Libertarian State of Narnia

Stay Out of Our Wardrobe!

The libertarian Narnia state.

By R. Andrew Newman

Narnia could share New Hampshire’s motto: Live Free or Die. C. S. Lewis’s land is a libertarian haven of talking animals and magical creatures. Sure, there are kings and queens, but Narnia’s royals govern more in line with Jefferson than many a democratic state this side of the wardrobe.

The story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of freedom. The White Witch’s icy tyranny is overthrown—Christmas, freedom, and spring return to the land—and all this is faithfully translated to the screen in Disney and Walden Media’s beautifully done movie adaptation. The struggle mirrors the war in the world of men, implicitly in the book and explicitly in the movie. The movie opens with the Nazi bombardment of London. Two wars in two worlds: both worth the sacrifice and fight.

I realize neither the book nor the movie is a policy manual or a political-philosophy tract gussied up with fauns, centaurs, and dwarves. And yet Narnia clearly is a land where freedom is valued and where the good state knows its limits.

Like the book, the movie ends with the daughters of Eve and sons of Adam, now grown into young adulthood, finding their way back to England. In the book, however, we also get a brief taste of how they governed from their thrones at Cair Paravel. First things first: dealing with the holdouts from the White Witch’s regime. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy know an iron fist is necessary to quash insurgents, and “in the end that foul brood was stamped out.”

Once peace has been established, High King Peter and his royal siblings begin to the administer the state: “And they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live.”

Amen to that. Where do I go to start the Draft Peter Pevensie for President Committee? And with three siblings, there’s good potential for a dynasty.

Their saving “good trees from being unnecessarily cut down” may raise some eyebrows outside of Green circles. Admittedly, development isn’t high on the list of priorities in Narnia. In fact, when the Calormenes invade in the final book of the series, The Last Battle, not least among their sins is chopping down trees. Lewis himself was no fan of development, but we must remember that Narnia has regular trees and spirit-filled trees. It indeed would be murder to kill the latter.

Speaking of Calormenes, they are slavers, and if there’s anything Narnians hate it is slavery. In The Horse and His Boy, an enslaved talking horse and a boy about to be sold into slavery escape north for Narnia. Before they leave Calormen, they meet up with a girl disguised as a boy. Of noble blood, she’s heading north for freedom to avoid a forced marriage.

I especially like the part of liberating young dwarfs and satyrs from school. Nor is this the only dig at the shortcomings of education in the series. When the children are hesitant to believe their sister Lucy’s reports of a world beyond the wardrobe, the Professor mutters, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.” There’s a delightful send-up of “progressive” education as well as of regulation and government in The Silver Chair. We are introduced to Experiment House, a co-educational school, “what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.” An inquiry brings the strange goings on at Experiment House to light, but this isn’t the end for the school’s Head. “After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.”

She wouldn’t have much cared for Narnia, where the state is modest, making good laws, keeping the peace, stopping busybodies, protecting the land and its subjects, and allowing folks to “live and let live.”

Perhaps some will think I’m making too much of this, piling political theory upon a children’s story. But Lewis himself feared the modern state. In an essay that deserves to be better known, “Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” Lewis argued that the state no longer exists to “protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers.’ We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”

At least in Narnia, the state has its business and the subjects retain theirs.

—R. Andrew Newman is a freelance writer in Nebraska.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzVhMDk2MTg4ZGI2OWQwYmQ0YTMyZmVhMmEwMmViN2U=

Aslan: The Lion King

The Lion King

by John J Miller

When Lucy Pevensie says that she has walked through a wardrobe and discovered a new world called Narnia, her older brothers and sister don’t believe her. But little Lucy insists. By the fifth chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the classic book by C. S. Lewis, two of her siblings begin to worry that the poor girl has lost her head. So they approach Professor Kirke, who is looking after them during World War II. “There are only three possibilities,” he says. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

It turns out, of course, that Lucy really is telling the truth, and it isn’t long before all the Pevensie kids have traveled to Narnia. Untold numbers of readers have followed them there — more than 85 million copies of the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia series are in print — and millions more will join them when a film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reaches theaters. The movie’s commercial potential is huge. If Narnia weren’t by now one of the great brand names in 20th-century children’s literature, its backers might have pitched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Hollywood as a cross between The Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ. That’s because it is both a fantastic adventure story and a profound expression of Christian belief. Because of this, Lewis’s famous tale not only stands on the threshold of blockbuster success, but also holds the potential to become the next great battleground in the culture wars.

Narnia certainly has its enemies. One of them is the White Witch, the fiendish creature who brings perpetual winter to the land. Another foe, in our own realm, is best-selling children’s author Philip Pullman, who has described the Narnia series as “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.” (Pullman has explained his own motives for writing books for kids this way: “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”) The Narnia movie may not deserve to generate controversy, but there can be no doubt that it will, especially from the quarters that objected to Mel Gibson’s interpreting the story of the crucifixion. Watch for Pullman to go on a new round of opportunistic Lewis-bashing, the New York Times to print hand-wringing articles about Narnian theocracy, and the ACLU to threaten litigation against public-school teachers who read the book to their students or encourage them to see the movie. When Florida governor Jeb Bush chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the centerpiece of a statewide reading program, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post pounced. Frank Cerabino complained about “this cabal of Christian commerce” and added, “We’re opening up the public schools to some backdoor catechism lessons.” As this manufactured controversy unfolds, there will be crude references to the author’s odd personal life, which included a lengthy relationship with the mother of a close friend — the source of endless gossip and speculation and controversy. Others will reproach Lewis for letting the word “darkies” appear in the Chronicles (he was a racist!), accuse him of preferring his male characters to his female ones (he was a sexist!), and theorize about why he spent most of his life as a bachelor and enjoyed the company of men (he was a closeted homosexual!). The attacks will begin from the moment movie reviewers — not an especially conservative group of people — file their first dispatches. The entire assault may prove relentless.

That’s because the Narnia stories are much more than meaningless entertainment for children. Some readers have said that the stories are Christian allegories — i.e., literary representations of Biblical events. Lewis denied this, but he did call them suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.” And so Aslan comes into Narnia as a talking lion, suffers and dies for the sins of a child, and rises again. Most grown-ups understand what’s going on here, even if many of the kids who listen to this as a bedtime story don’t have a clue.

Clive Staples Lewis, of course, was the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. He was born near Belfast in 1898; he died at the age of 64, on the same day JFK was shot. None of his contemporaries could compete with his wit, intelligence, or influence, and arguably none has matched him since. He spent most of his adult life as a professor at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the 1930s he had established his reputation well enough that he was handed the prestigious assignment of writing the third volume in the Oxford History of English Literature. It covered the 16th century and took years to finish — frustrating Lewis so much that he wondered whether the pronunciation of its acronym, “Oh Hell,” was more than a coincidence. Yet many Lewis aficionados consider it his finest work. Today Lewis is revered as a popularizer of the Christian faith who also produced some literary criticism; in truth, Lewis viewed himself as an academic who wrote about religion on the side.

He certainly possessed a remarkable vocation for it, in part because as a young man he had succumbed to atheism. Just as some of the most penetrating critics of Communism have been ex-Communists, Lewis’s own period of irreligiousness equipped him with a disarming ability to explain and defend the principles of Christian life and thought. His conversion did not spring from a sudden epiphany, but was more like what his brother Warren called “a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing.” It was, above all, a carefully considered decision. His friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow Oxford professor and an orthodox Catholic, was instrumental in coaxing him along. (Lewis returned the favor: Tolkien once said that he never would have finished The Lord of the Rings without his friend’s unflagging encouragement.)

The writings of G. K. Chesterton also helped sway Lewis, especially Chesterton’s observation that when Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he was revealing himself to be either a crazy or a phony — or, in fact, the flesh-and-blood Son of God. This insight would have a profound effect on The Chronicles of Narnia and their depiction of Lucy’s initial comings and goings through the wardrobe. Before that, however, it would help Lewis craft one of the most famous passages he ever wrote about his faith.

During World War II, Lewis delivered a series of radio broadcasts over the BBC. These were eventually collected in a book, Mere Christianity, which remains one of his most popular titles. In one of its short essays, Lewis noted that many skeptics are willing to call Jesus “a great moral teacher” but unwilling to accept his divinity. Lewis held a dim view of this position:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

It is a jarring passage — by no means an iron trap of logic (it is conceivable that a madman might utter wise words), but surely a line of reasoning that forces clear thinking. Protestant evangelist Josh McDowell has called this set of choices — Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord — the “trilemma.” In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Kirke presents the Pevensie kids with their own trilemma as they consider Lucy’s talk of Narnia. Call it “liar, lunatic, or logic.” Before long, the children enter Narnia together and the older ones apologize to their sister for disbelieving her story.

As it becomes clear to them that Lucy is neither a liar nor a lunatic, Lewis’s grand purpose begins to emerge. After asking Lucy’s forgiveness, the Pevensies wonder where they should go. A robin flies into sight and offers itself as a guide. One of the kids questions whether they should follow it. Could it be leading them into a trap? “That’s a nasty idea,” says Peter, the oldest. “They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read.” As Jonathan Rogers points out in The World According to Narnia, “This is the first instance of a theme that recurs throughout the Chronicles: The children know what to do because they have read the right imaginative stories.”

Yet Lewis worried that the right imaginative stories were in short supply. (Another subtle theme of the Narnia books is the inadequacy of British schooling.) “There is too little of what we really like in stories,” Lewis once told Tolkien. “I am afraid we shall have to try to write some ourselves.” In offering Narnia, one of his main goals was to save children from his own fate of falling into the snare of disbelief. Lewis believed that a powerful sense of compulsion spoiled his religious upbringing. “Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?” he once asked (in what was for him an uncommonly stilted passage). “I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Then he continued: “But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.” If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then Narnia is the continuation of Sunday school by different devices.

And so each of the books in the series contains elements of Christian instruction: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe confronts the challenge of belief and introduces the concepts of sacrificial death and resurrected life; Prince Caspian describes a period of corruption and restoration; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes a baptism scene; The Silver Chair recounts a descent into hell; The Horse and His Boy takes on the problem of unbelievers; The Magician’s Nephew offers a creation story and reveals the origin of evil; and The Last Battle depicts the end of the world. Many children who encounter these stories miss the analogues completely. That was all right by Lewis. “I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination,” he once said. So when Professor Kirke explains why Lucy’s reports of Narnia might be true, Lewis isn’t hoping that kids will think of Chesterton. But he does hope to create the conditions for them to gain a sophisticated understanding of their faith, when they’re ready to grasp it.

The miracle of the forthcoming movie may be that its producers didn’t try to distort Narnia beyond recognition. There have been attempts to do this in the past. During the 1990s, for instance, Paramount owned the film rights to The Chronicles of Narnia and began to develop a script for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Moving the book’s setting from wartime Britain to modern Los Angeles (and replacing air raids with earthquakes) was the least of its flaws: The Pevensie children apparently entered Narnia not through a wardrobe but through a swimming pool, and the White Witch tempted Edmund not with Turkish delight but with cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Worst of all, Hollywood proposed that perhaps Aslan shouldn’t be killed. That would have represented a literary sacrilege, like rewriting The Passion of the Christ so that Jesus doesn’t die. “Some of these ideas really shocked me,” says Douglas Gresham, a stepson of Lewis and an executor of his estate. “Ultimately these scripts were never made into movies because nobody really wanted to make them.” One of the key factors must have been the concern that an unbowdlerized version would be seen as little more than Christian propaganda. Indeed, even HarperCollins, the publisher of Lewis’s work, has felt the urge to neuter Narnia. Four years ago, it announced plans to release a new series of books based on Lewis’s characters. “We’ll need to be able to give emphatic reassurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology,” said a memo that was leaked to the media. Lewis fans gnashed their teeth, and HarperCollins had the good sense to shelve this rotten idea.

By 2001, Paramount’s rights to Narnia had lapsed. Walden Media, a Boston-based company headed by Michael Flaherty (who briefly worked for National Review in the early 1990s), bought them from Gresham. One of Walden’s strategic aims is to take outstanding children’s books and turn them into films. In the last two years, it has produced Holes and Because of Winn-Dixie; next year will see the release of a live-action Charlotte’s Web. (For The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and its budget of more than $150 million, Disney ultimately became a co-financier.) Refreshingly, Walden has embraced Narnia’s Christian themes. The movie is true to the book in almost every way. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a short book, so it’s easy to get everything in,” says Flaherty. The film actually contains several helpful flourishes. It provides extra historical context for the German bombing of London and the evacuation of city children into the English countryside. (At one point, a news broadcast plays over a radio in the background, and the voice belongs to Gresham — a thoughtful tribute to his stepfather’s own wartime commentaries.) In the book, Father Christmas makes a joyful appearance in Narnia; in the movie, the scene closes with Lucy gently scolding her older sister Susan, “I told you he was real.” Lucy is blessed with an extraordinary gift of faith, a quality that allows her to accept the reality of Narnia when her older and supposedly wiser siblings won’t. Her new line, which she doesn’t speak in the book, actually enhances the story in an understated but compelling way.

Unlike the works of other literary giants, which are often more admired than read, C. S. Lewis’s writings have had an increased readership owing to the widespread acclaim. Yet Lewis is not great because he is popular; he is popular because he is great. His greatness has been ignored by some, especially in English departments. Others have scorned it. Such assessments won’t change this winter, as Narnia achieves its highest level of public exposure. Instead, opinions of Lewis are bound to intensify. But the larger effect will be positive. Lewis enthusiasts massively outnumber Narnia’s naysayers. Their ranks will swell, as moviegoers become book readers and book readers dust off an old favorite. And a new franchise may be born, as Hollywood becomes excited at the prospect of six moneymaking sequels. It seems hard to believe, but the importance of C. S. Lewis will increase rather than diminish. As Professor Kirke tells Lucy’s brother and sister, when they come to grips with the possibility of worlds beyond our own: “Nothing is more probable.”

http://www.holyspiritinteractive.net/columns/guests/johnjmiller/thelionking.asp

The New Republican Party – 1977

The New Republican Party

Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA)

Conservative Political Action Conference

Washington, DC

February 6, 1977

I’m happy to be back with you in this annual event after missing last year’s meeting. I had some business in New Hampshire that wouldn’t wait.

Three weeks ago here in our nation’s capital I told a group of conservative scholars that we are currently in the midst of a re-ordering of the political realities that have shaped our time. We know today that the principles and values that lie at the heart of conservatism are shared by the majority.

Despite what some in the press may say, we who are proud to call ourselves “conservative” are not a minority of a minority party; we are part of the great majority of Americans of both major parties and of most of the independents as well.

A Harris poll released September 7, 1975 showed 18 percent identifying themselves as liberal and 31 percent as conservative, with 41 percent as middle of the road; a few months later, on January 5, 1976, by a 43-19 plurality, those polled by Harris said they would “prefer to see the country move in a more conservative direction than a liberal one.”

Last October 24th, the Gallup organization released the result of a poll taken right in the midst of the presidential campaign.

Respondents were asked to state where they would place themselves on a scale ranging from “right-of-center” (which was defined as “conservative”) to left-of-center (which was defined as “liberal”).

• Thirty-seven percent viewed themselves as left-of-center or liberal
• Twelve percent placed themselves in the middle
• Fifty-one percent said they were right-of-center, that is, conservative.

What I find interesting about this particular poll is that it offered those polled a range of choices on a left-right continuum. This seems to me to be a more realistic approach than dividing the world into strict left and rights. Most of us, I guess, like to think of ourselves as avoiding both extremes, and the fact that a majority of Americans chose one or the other position on the right end of the spectrum is really impressive.

Those polls confirm that most Americans are basically conservative in their outlook. But once we have said this, we conservatives have not solved our problems, we have merely stated them clearly. Yes, conservatism can and does mean different things to those who call themselves conservatives.

You know, as I do, that most commentators make a distinction between [what] they call “social” conservatism and “economic” conservatism. The so-called social issues—law and order, abortion, busing, quota systems—are usually associated with blue-collar, ethnic and religious groups themselves traditionally associated with the Democratic Party. The economic issues—inflation, deficit spending and big government—are usually associated with Republican Party members and independents who concentrate their attention on economic matters.

Now I am willing to accept this view of two major kinds of conservatism—or, better still, two different conservative constituencies. But at the same time let me say that the old lines that once clearly divided these two kinds of conservatism are disappearing.

In fact, the time has come to see if it is possible to present a program of action based on political principle that can attract those interested in the so-called “social” issues and those interested in “economic” issues. In short, isn’t it possible to combine the two major segments of contemporary American conservatism into one politically effective whole?

I believe the answer is: Yes, it is possible to create a political entity that will reflect the views of the great, hitherto [unacknowledged], conservative majority. We went a long way toward doing it in California. We can do it in America. This is not a dream, a wistful hope. It is and has been a reality. I have seen the conservative future and it works.

Let me say again what I said to our conservative friends from the academic world: What I envision is not simply a melding together of the two branches of American conservatism into a temporary uneasy alliance, but the creation of a new, lasting majority.

This will mean compromise. But not a compromise of basic principle. What will emerge will be something new: something open and vital and dynamic, something the great conservative majority will recognize as its own, because at the heart of this undertaking is principled politics.

I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press and the television evening news it is treated as a call for “ideological purity.” Whatever ideology may mean—and it seems to mean a variety of things, depending upon who is using it—it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country “ideology” is a scare word. And for good reason. Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.

I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in this world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American conservatism.

When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.

When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom he is not theorizing—he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain.

When a conservative says that busing does not work, he is not appealing to some theory of education—he is merely reporting what he has seen down at the local school.

When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire.

Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way—this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.

The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations—found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.

One thing that must be made clear in post-Watergate is this: The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say: “Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.” That is not “ideological purity.” It is simply what built this country and kept it great.

Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right—those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.

Our first job is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles. If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops without correcting this error we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. Wherever and whenever we can, we should gently but firmly correct our political and media friends who have been perpetuating the myth of conservatism as a narrow ideology. Whatever the word may have meant in the past, today conservatism means principles evolving from experience and a belief in change when necessary, but not just for the sake of change.

Once we have established this, the next question is: What will be the political vehicle by which the majority can assert its rights?

I have to say I cannot agree with some of my friends—perhaps including some of you here tonight—who have answered that question by saying this nation needs a new political party.

I respect that view and I know that those who have reached it have done so after long hours of study. But I believe that political success of the principles we believe in can best be achieved in the Republican Party. I believe the Republican Party can hold and should provide the political mechanism through which the goals of the majority of Americans can be achieved. For one thing, the biggest single grouping of conservatives is to be found in that party. It makes more sense to build on that grouping than to break it up and start over.

Rather than a third party, we can have a new first party made up of people who share our principles. I have said before that if a formal change in name proves desirable, then so be it. But tonight, for purpose of discussion, I’m going to refer to it simply as the New Republican Party.

And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean: The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot, be one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism. If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by simply “making room” for them, but by making certain they have a say in what goes on in the party. The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.

The time has come for Republicans to say to black voters: “Look, we offer principles that black Americans can, and do, support.” We believe in jobs, real jobs; we believe in education that is really education; we believe in treating all Americans as individuals and not as stereotypes or voting blocs—and we believe that the long-range interest of black Americans lies in looking at what each major party has to offer, and then deciding on the merits. The Democratic Party takes the black vote for granted. Well, it’s time black America and the New Republican Party move toward each other and create a situation in which no black vote can be taken for granted.

The New Republican Party I envision is one that will energetically seek out the best candidates for every elective office, candidates who not only agree with, but understand, and are willing to fight for a sound, honest economy, for the interests of American families and neighborhoods and communities and a strong national defense. And these candidates must be able to communicate those principles to the American people in language they understand. Inflation isn’t a textbook problem. Unemployment isn’t a textbook problem.

They should be discussed in human terms.

Our candidates must be willing to communicate with every level of society, because the principles we espouse are universal and cut across traditional lines. In every Congressional district there should be a search made for young men and women who share these principles and they should be brought into positions of leadership in the local Republican Party groups. We can find attractive, articulate candidates if we look, and when we find them, we will begin to change the sorry state of affairs that has led to a Democratic-controlled Congress for more than 40 years. I need not remind you that you can have the soundest principles in the world, but if you don’t have candidates who can communicate those principles, candidates who are articulate as well as principled, you are going to lose election after election. I refuse to believe that the good Lord divided this world into Republicans who defend basic values and Democrats who win elections. We have to find tough, bright young men and women who are sick and tired of cliches and the pomposity and the mind-numbing economic idiocy of the liberals in Washington.

It is at this point, however, that we come across a question that is really the essential one: What will be the basis of this New Republican Party? To what set of values and principles can our candidates appeal? Where can Americans who want to know where we stand look for guidance?

Fortunately, we have an answer to that question. That answer was provided last summer by the men and women of the Republican Party—not just the leadership, but the ones who have built the party on local levels all across the country.

The answer was provided in the 1976 platform of the Republican Party.

This was not a document handed down from on high. It was hammered out in free and open debate among all those who care about our party and the principles it stands for.

The Republican platform is unique. Unlike any other party platform I have ever seen, it answers not only programmatic questions for the immediate future of the party but also provides a clear outline of the underlying principles upon which those programs are based.

The New Republican Party can and should use the Republican platform of 1976 as the major source from which a Declaration of Principles can be created and offered to the American people.

Tonight I want to offer to you my own version of what such a declaration might look like. I make no claim to originality. This declaration I propose is relatively short, taken, for most part, word for word from the Republican platform. It concerns itself with basic principles, not with specific solutions.

We, the members of the New Republican Party, believe that the preservation and enhancement of the values that strengthen and protect individual freedom, family life, communities and neighborhoods and the liberty of our beloved nation should be at the heart of any legislative or political program presented to the American people. Toward that end, we, therefore, commit ourselves to the following propositions and offer them to each American believing that the New Republican Party, based on such principles, will serve the interest of all the American people.

We believe that liberty can be measured by how much freedom Americans have to make their own decisions, even their own mistakes. Government must step in when one’s liberties impinge on one’s neighbor’s. Government must protect constitutional rights, deal with other governments, protect citizens from aggressors, assure equal opportunity, and be compassionate in caring for those citizens who are unable to care for themselves.

Our federal system of local-state-national government is designed to sort out on what level these actions should be taken. Those concerns of a national character—such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties—must, of course, be handled on the national level.

As a general rule, however, we believe that government action should be taken first by the government that resides as close to you as possible.

We also believe that Americans, often acting through voluntary organizations, should have the opportunity to solve many of the social problems of their communities. This spirit of freely helping others is uniquely American and should be encouraged in every way by government.

Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation.

Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.

Thus it is imperative that our government’s programs, actions, officials and social welfare institutions never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them. The New Republican Party must be committed to working always in the interest of the American family.

Every dollar spent by government is a dollar earned by individuals. Government must always ask: Are your dollars being wisely spent? Can we afford it? Is it not better for the country to leave your dollars in your pocket?

Elected officials, their appointees, and government workers are expected to perform their public acts with honesty, openness, diligence, and special integrity.

Government must work for the goal of justice and the elimination of unfair practices, but no government has yet designed a more productive economic system or one which benefits as many people as the American market system.

The beauty of our land is our legacy to our children. It must be protected by us so that they can pass it on intact to their children.

The United States must always stand for peace and liberty in the world and the rights of the individual. We must form sturdy partnerships with our allies for the preservation of freedom.

We must be ever willing to negotiate differences, but equally mindful that there are

American ideals that cannot be compromised. Given that there are other nations with potentially hostile design, we recognize that we can reach our goals only while maintaining a superior national defense, second to none.

In his inaugural speech President Carter said that he saw the world “dominated by a new spirit.” He said, and I quote: “The passion for freedom is on the rise.”

Well, I don’t know how he knows this, but if it is true, then it is the most unrequited passion in human history. The world is being dominated by a new spirit, all right, but it isn’t the spirit of freedom.

It isn’t very often you see a familiar object that shocks and frightens you. But the other day I came across a map of the world created by Freedom House, an organization monitoring the state of freedom in the world for the past 25 years. It is an ordinary map, with one exception: it shows the world’s nations in white for free, shaded for partly free and black for not free.

Almost all of the great Eurasian land mass is completely colored black, from the western border of East Germany, through middle and eastern Europe, through the awesome spaces of the Soviet Union, on to the Bering Strait in the north, down past the immensity of China, still further down to Vietnam and the South China Sea—in all that huge, sprawling, inconceivably immense area not a single political or personal or religious freedom exists. The entire continent of Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, all that vastness is almost totally unfree. In the tiny nation of Tanzania alone, according to a report in the New York Times, there are 3,000 people in detention for political crimes—that is more than the total being held in South Africa! The Mideast has only one free state: Israel. If a visitor from another planet were to approach earth, and if this planet showed free nations in light and unfree nations in darkness, the pitifully small beacons of light would make him wonder what was hidden in that terrifying, enormous blackness.

We know what is hidden: Gulag. Torture. Families—and human beings—broken apart. No free press, no freedom of religion. The ancient forms of tyranny revived and made even more hideous and strong through what Winston Churchill once called “a perverted science.”

Men rotting for years in solitary confinement because they have different political and economic beliefs, solitary confinement that drives the fortunate ones insane and makes the survivors wish for death.

Only now and then do we in the West hear a voice from out of that darkness. Then there is silence—the silence of human slavery. There is no more terrifying sound in human experience, with one possible exception. Look at that map again. The very heart of the darkness is the Soviet Union and from that heart comes a different sound. It is the whirring sound of machinery and the whisper of the computer technology we ourselves have sold them. It is the sound of building, building of the strongest military machine ever devised by man. Our military strategy is designed to hopefully prevent a war. Theirs is designed to win one. A group of eminent scientists, scholars and intelligence experts offer a survey showing that the Soviet Union is driving for military superiority and are derided as hysterically

making, quote, “a worst case,” unquote, concerning Soviet intentions and capabilities.

But is it not precisely the duty of the national government to be prepared for the worst case? Two Senators, after studying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have reported to the Armed Forces Committee that Soviet forces in Eastern Europe have the capability to launch, with little warning, a “potentially devastating” attack in Central Europe from what is termed a “standing alert.”

Reading their report, one can almost see the enormous weight of the parts of the earth that are under tyranny shifting in an irresistible tilt toward that tiny portion of land in freedom’s light. Even now in Western Europe we have Communists in the government of Italy, France appeasing terrorists, and England—for centuries the model or the sword of freedom in Western Europe—weak, dispirited, turning inward.

A “worst case”? How could you make a good case out of the facts as they are known? The Soviet Union, poised on the edge of free Europe, capable of striking from a standing start, has modern tanks in far greater numbers than the outmoded vehicles of NATO. We have taken comfort from NATO’s superiority in the air, but now the Soviet Union has made a dramatic swing away from its historic defensive air posture to one capable of supporting offensive action. NATO’s southern flank is described in the Senate report with a single word: shambles.

The report is simply reality as it was, with different names and faces, in Europe in the late 1930s when so many refused to believe and thought if we don’t look the threat will go away.

We don’t want hysteria. We don’t want distortion of Soviet power. We want truth. And above all we want peace. And to have [recognition] that the United States has to immediately re-examine its entire view of the world and develop a strategy of freedom. We cannot be the second-best super-power for the simple reason that he who is second is last.

In this deadly game, there are no silver medals for second.

President Carter, as a candidate, said he would cut five to seven billion dollars from the defense budget. We must let him know that while we agree, there must be no fat in our armed forces. Those armed forces must be capable of coping with the new reality presented to us by the Russians, and cutting seven billion dollars out of our defense budget is not the way to accomplish this. Some years ago, a young President said, we will make any sacrifice, bear any burden, and we will, to preserve our freedom.

Our relationship with mainland China is clouded. The so-called “Gang of Four” are up one day and down the next and we are seeing the pitfalls of making deals with charismatic personalities and living legends. The charisma fades as the living legends die, and those who take their place are interested not in our best wishes but in power. The keyword for China today is turmoil. We should watch and observe and analyze as closely and rationally as we can.

But in our relationships with the mainland of China we should always remember that the conditions and possibilities for and the realities of freedom exist to an infinitely greater degree with our Chinese friends in Taiwan. We can never go wrong if we do what is morally right, and the moral way—the honorable way—is to keep our commitment, our solemn promise to the people of Taiwan. Our liberal friends have made much of the lack of freedom in some Latin American countries. Senator Edward Kennedy and his colleagues here in Washington let no opportunity pass to let us know about horrors in Chile.

Well, I think when the United States of America is considering a deal with a country that hasn’t had an election in almost eight years, where the press is under the thumb of a dictatorship, where ordinary citizens are abducted in the night by secret police, where military domination of the country is known to be harsh on dissenters and when these things are documented, we should reject overtures from those who rule such a country.

But the country I’m describing is not Chile—it is Panama.

We are negotiating with a dictatorship that comes within the portion of that map colored black for no freedom. No civil rights. One-man rule. No free press.

Candidate Carter said he would never relinquish “actual control” of the Panama Canal.

President Carter is negotiating with a dictatorship whose record on civil and human rights is as I have just described and the negotiations concern the rights guaranteed to us by treaty which we will give up under a threat of violence. In only a few weeks we will mark the second anniversary of the death of freedom for the Vietnamese. An estimated 300,000 of them are being “re-educated” in concentration camps to forget about freedom.

There is only one major question on the agenda of national priorities and that is the state of our national security. I refer, of course, to the state of our armed forces—but also to our state of mind, to the way we perceive the world. We cannot maintain the strength we need to survive, no matter how many missiles we have, no matter how many tanks we build, unless we are willing to reverse:

The trend of deteriorating faith in and continuing abuse of our national intelligence agencies. Let’s stop the sniping and the propaganda and the historical revisionism and let

the CIA and the other intelligence agencies do their job!

Let us reverse the trend of public indifference to problems of national security. In every congressional district citizens should join together, enlist and educate neighbors and make certain that congressmen know we care. The front pages of major newspapers on the East Coast recently headlined and told in great detail of a takeover, the takeover of a magazine published in New York—not a nation losing its freedom. You would think, from the attention it received in the media, that it was a matter of blazing national interest whether the magazine lived or died. The tendency of much of the media to ignore the state of our

national security is too well documented for me to go on.

My friends, the time has come to start acting to bring about the great conservative majority party we know is waiting to be created.

And just to set the record straight, let me say this about our friends who are now Republicans but who do not identify themselves as conservatives: I want the record to show that I do not view the new revitalized Republican Party as one based on a principle of exclusion. After all, you do not get to be a majority party by searching for groups you won’t associate or work with. If we truly believe in our principles, we should sit down and talk.

Talk with anyone, anywhere, at any time if it means talking about the principles for the Republican Party. Conservatism is not a narrow ideology, nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists.

We’ve succeeded better than we know. Little more than a decade ago more than two-thirds of Americans believed the federal government could solve all our problems, and do so

without restricting our freedom or bankrupting the nation.

We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass.

And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin.

Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home.

We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it.

The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when?

Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.

Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. Any organization is in actuality only the lengthened shadow of its members. A political party is a mechanical structure created to further a cause. The cause, not the mechanism, brings and holds the members together. And our cause must be to rediscover, reassert and reapply America’s spiritual heritage to our national affairs.

Then with God’s help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us.

Who’s Afraid of C.S. Lewis?

Who’s Afraid of C. S. Lewis?

Narnia critics should relax.

By Rich Lowry

A few months ago, it seemed unlikely that the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe could achieve anything like the commercial liftoff of that other film embraced by Christians, The Passion of the Christ. Controversy sells, and The Passion had about it an alleged whiff of anti-Semitism. “Narnia,” based on the beloved children’s books, has no such thing, but it turns out that the movie’s whiff of Christianity alone has been enough to stoke a roiling prerelease debate.

C.S. Lewis, the late Christian apologist and Oxford don who is the author of the seven-book Narnia series, has been the subject of critical, even contemptuous, pieces in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. The press coverage of the movie has emphasized how a (tiny) proportion of its marketing budget has been directed at—gasp!—Christians. The British author Philip Pullman has said the Narnia books are based on “reactionary prejudice,” and the British paper the Guardian attacked the stories for representing “everything that is most hateful about religion.”

For anyone who has been enchanted by the stories (100 million copies sold), this reaction must be bizarre. Who is afraid of C. S. Lewis, and why?

His frank Christianity has a lot to do with it. To put it in terms of the current war over season’s greetings, the Narnia books aren’t “happy holidays” kinds of stories, but instead verily shout “Merry Christmas!” (Father Christmas is a character in them.) Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, also a believer, thought Lewis laid on the Christian allegory too thick. But it is also Lewis’s sensibility that irks the elite guardians of a culture that so treasures skepticism and irony. In the Narnia stories, Lewis is making the case for the opposite, for a child’s openness to what might seem impossible to the narrow “adult” mind.

In the story, four children enter through a wardrobe into a parallel winter world, Narnia, where Aslan the lion, who is the Christ-figure, and the White Witch do battle. The most important influence on Lewis’s work was his concept of “joy,” the sense of longing for a world beyond and more marvelous than our own. He always found that literature and myth best captured this sense, and the key moment in his conversion was when Tolkien convinced him that Christianity was “true myth.”

Lewis and Tolkien wanted to reinvigorate the powers of the imagination so it would be primed to detect the hints of a higher and deeper reality—“further up, further in,” as Lewis put it. A theme of the Narnia books is that the children instinctively know the right thing to do because, as Lewis scholar Jonathan Rogers explains, “they have read the right imaginative stories.” Lewis and Tolkien undertook their project against the grain in a mid-20th century that was an age of desiccated rationality.

We have gotten more desiccated since. Now everything tends to be viewed through the postmodern trinity of race, gender and sex. British fantasist Philip Pullman has said the Narnia stories are racist since the villains are dark-skinned. What does he make, then, of the aptly named White Witch, who represents Satan? Then, there’s the charge of misogyny and a sexually repressive Puritanism.

The New York Times Magazine essayist regrets that Susan, one of the children, is denied salvation at the end of the series “merely because of her fondness for nylons and lipstick,” because in other words, “she has reached puberty [and] become sexualized.” That’s not it at all. The point is that, as one character says, Susan “always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” For Lewis this meant losing the capacity to be childlike, with its guileless receptivity to wonderment and joy.

The Christian signposts will be lost on many viewers of the movie, who will simply relish a good yarn and its accompanying wonderment and joy. Lewis critics should relax and experience some of it themselves.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjFlZGQ3NGI2NWMxYTY4MjMzZTc4YTNhZTI4Y2ZjMDQ=

Christmas in Narnia

Xmas in Narnia

Have Yourself a Merry Little Aslanmas?
If ever there were a case for taking Christ out of Christmas, it’s arguably in Narnia.

There is no Christ in Narnia — there is only Aslan, the lion who dies for the sins of others and returns in glorious triumph. So instead of Christmas, shouldn’t the Narnians celebrate Aslanmas? And shouldn’t Lewis have left Father Christmas out of his books entirely?

This is more than just a rose-by-any-other-name semantic dispute, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental criticism that many people level at The Chronicles of Narnia: The books are full of maddening inconsistencies.

When we first encounter Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, we learn that a permanent winter has descended upon the land. This creates a problem later in the story, as Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead describe in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe:

Another friend [of Lewis's], poet Ruth Pitter, recalled with pleasure her good-natured “win” over Lewis, when she caught him in a textual error in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: where did the beavers obtain certain foodstuffs (e.g., potatoes, flour, sugar, oranges, milk) for the dinner they provided for the Pevensie children, given that it was winter and (by Lewis’s own setup of the story) no foreign trade was allowed? According to Pitter’s memory of the conversation, Lewis had no answer and was “stumped.”

Maybe the food was smuggled into Narnia from Calormen, a country to the south. But that’s pure speculation. And even if this were the case, it is a flaw on the part of Lewis: A good story doesn’t create puzzles for readers; it answers questions before they’re even asked. Lewis is perhaps under a special obligation to explain the food, given that the feast with the beavers is one of the most sensual passages in the book. Where did those big rodents get their chow?

The beavers create other problems as well. “There’s never been any of your race here before,” says Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie kids. As we learn later in the series, however, this isn’t true. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Mr. Beaver not knowing any better. Yet his statement is actually the result of Lewis not knowing any better. When he started writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not plan to compose six sequels. Later books suffer from some near-sightedness that found its way into the first one.

Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth

Narnia simply wasn’t prepared with the meticulous attention to detail that J. R. R. Tolkien lavished upon to Middle Earth. And Tolkien famously criticized Narnia as an awkward mishmash of a world. It must have pained him to do so: He and Lewis were not only colleagues at Oxford, but also personal friends. Tolkien played a key role in Lewis’s decision to become a Christian, in what is probably one of the most significant conversions of the 20th century. The author of The Lord of the Rings might not have finished his own masterpiece but for Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. So he probably would have liked to return the favor and cheer on Lewis in the writing of Narnia. Yet Tolkien was a relentlessly honest man and he could not hide his antipathy for the Narnian project: “I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story,” he told a mutual friend. “It really won’t do, you know!” (To his buddies, Lewis was known as “Jack.”)

Perhaps Tolkien was jealous that Lewis could whip out seven books in seven years — the man wrote at a delirious speed, and Tolkien couldn’t have kept pace even if he had tried. Yet his critique of Narnia contains both substance and merit. Tolkien believed that Lewis veered too close to Christian allegory. Lewis denied this, calling his tales suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”

Maybe you have to be an English major to care about the difference between an allegory and a supposition. Tolkien’s primary objection to Narnia, however, raised another issue entirely. He thought that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was an irritating blend of different cultural traditions: centaurs and fauns from the Greeks, dwarves from the Norse, and so on. And that’s even before we get to this strange business about Jesus, Aslan, and Father Christmas.

Lewis was a great borrower, and it drove Tolkien bonkers. In Perelandra, a science-fiction book published in 1943, Lewis makes a reference to “Numinor.” This was meant as a kind of tribute to Tolkien, who wrote of the “Numenor,” which was a kingdom of Middle Earth. Note the slightly different spelling, which may be the result of Lewis being sloppy or thinking the word’s root was “numinous.” Whatever the case, it was not in keeping with Tolkien the philologist’s carefully crafted linguistics. It was a dabbler’s error, the sort of dumb blunder that Tolkien strove to banish from Middle Earth.

The Numenor-Numinor controversy is of course an exceedingly small thing for casual readers of Tolkien and Lewis. The introduction of Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is obvious and jarring, even if you don’t compose elaborate letters from Father Christmas every year (as Tolkien did). Shouldn’t St. Nick just stay on our side of the wardrobe?

Kids!

Perhaps. But he does play an important role in Narnia. Lewis has a wonderful line early in the book about how the White Witch has made it “always winter but never Christmas.” If we cross out the Christmas half of it, the line doesn’t carry nearly half the punch: the witch doesn’t seem nearly so terrible, nor does the plight of the Narnians seem quite so grave. That’s especially true for children, for whom Christmas is a time of magical importance. And the arrival of Father Christmas presents the first clear evidence that the tables have turned against the witch. “I’ve come at last,” he says to the Pevensie kids. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The witch’s magic is weakening.” With that, the spell over Narnia begins to break.

It is of course possible that Lewis might have accomplished the same trick, from a narrative standpoint, without importing Father Christmas. It is also perfectly legitimate to stand with Tolkien and declare that Father Christmas has absolutely no business sledding around a fantasy world in which there is an Aslan but not a Christ. But perhaps this misses the point. The Chronicles of Narnia, after all, are written for children. My own kids love the Father Christmas scene, and I suspect that on some level they grasp its real meaning. To say that it doesn’t belong in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to argue against the actual experience of countless readers who also have enjoyed it and grasped it. In the end, it may in fact be a very grown-up kind of critique — sober and logical, but blind to the imaginative sensibilities of kids. Can you picture an 8-year-old who would care about the spelling of Numenor/Numinor? That’s a discussion for adults — and even then, only for adults of a very certain type. Narnia, by contrast, is a great big fantasy playground — and as Lewis makes clear throughout the Chronicles, grown ups can’t go there. So maybe Father Christmas is a kid thing, and you just wouldn’t understand.

So is it Christmas or Aslanmas in Narnia? Maybe we should just leave it a mystery, like the beaver’s food. Or we could call it Xmas, using “X” in the algebraic sense of “solve for X.” But let’s remember that most kids don’t like algebra either.

If you’ve made it this far, it probably means that you haven’t yet suffered from Narnia fatigue. Here are three other pieces I’ve written for NRO on C.S. Lewis and Narnia: a general appreciation, an argument on the order in which the Narnian books ought to be read, and first impressions of the new movie.

— John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200512220847.asp

Much Has Changed in Narnia

Much Has Changed in Narnia
Too little Lion, too much Witch, no Wardrobe.

By Thomas S. Hibbs

A wonderful scene in the second half of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian — the second film in the Narnia series, based on C. S. Lewis’s beloved books — highlights the importance of cultivating a memory of the past in the face of strong cultural and political tendencies toward decay and decline. Returning to Narnia after a one-year absence (1,300 years in Narnia time), the Pevensie children — Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) — find themselves in a cave whose walls are covered with ancient drawings. The drawings are memorials to them and their heroic feats in Narnia; it turns out that they have entered a sort of crypt built around the stone tablet on which Aslan was murdered and from which he rose to defeat the White Witch.

The sense of the remote past, as both almost lost and yet recoverable, permeates Lewis’s book. Yet, apart from the scene in the cave, the film neglects this theme in favor of grand battles and a budding romance between Caspian (in a rather lackluster performance by Ben Barnes) and Susan. Indeed, devoted readers of Lewis’s books will likely take umbrage at the many changes the filmmakers have introduced. The unsettling question they ought to be asking themselves is whether the film transforms what, following Chesterton, we might call a great romance of orthodoxy into a Hollywood bubble-gum romance.

Having issued that harsh charge, I hasten to add two qualifications. On its own terms, the film version of Prince Caspian has much to offer. It is a solid piece of entertainment, with rousing battle scenes and many moments of humor. (The CG character Reepicheep, the honorable and hilarious mouse, steals every scene in which he appears.) But Caspian is more: it contains moving portrayals of the seductive power of temptation, and profound reflections on heroism — including a lesson on how the inordinate use of violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim. Perhaps most impressive, particularly for those who have seen the first film, is the transformation of Edmund, who remains repentant for having disbelieved Lucy and for having treacherously served the White Witch. In a splendid performance, Skandar Keynes makes Edmund’s moral development credible and palpable; he is now wiser, more faithful, and more resolute.

The other thing that needs saying about the film is that the book from which it is drawn presents greater challenges to the filmmaker than does The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Director Andrew Adamson, who directed the first Narnia film after achieving fame for his work on the Shrek movies, takes more liberties with Lewis’s book than he did in the first film, of necessity. In the first half of Lewis’s book, he brings the Pevensie children (and his readers) up to date on the 1,300 years of Narnian history since the events related in the first book.

Lewis is doing more here than giving us a prolix prelude to a final battle. He is attempting to captivate his audience with the art of storytelling and with the superiority of real history over what passes for knowledge of the past in contemporary culture or in an ordinary academic setting. Lewis is also telling us something about the eponymous Caspian, a royal son, raised by his scheming uncle Miraz — who, it turns out, murdered Caspian’s father, and whose opportunistic desire to care for Caspian dissolves once his own wife gives birth to a son. We also learn that Caspian is from his youth a “lover of the Old Things,” in contrast to his uncle, who actively seeks to suppress the ancient and heroic history of Narnia.

Now, it makes sense to streamline Lewis’s historical narration, but, apart from the scene in the cave, the film fails to find a way to inject its version of the story with Lewis’s sense of devotion to the “Old Things.” Stressing Caspian’s longing to revive a lost way of life would have given his character greater gravity, something needed in the film to counterbalance the boyish good looks of Ben Barnes. His pretty appearance, the lack of character depth, and the filmmakers decision to focus on his innocuous flirtations with Susan render him a less than persuasive embodiment of Lewis’s main character.

That is not to say that all the changes are ill-conceived. One addition that works effectively is a longish battle scene in which Peter leads a surprise attack on Miraz’s castle, from which his army has to retreat in humiliation and sorrow, leaving behind many dead comrades.

Another addition concerns the reappearance of the White Witch, whose return is mentioned in the book as a possibility, but which never comes to pass. In the film, she returns — and who can blame them for bringing back Tilda Swinton’s chilling menace? — paralyzed in ice, which is a marvelously fitting image that recalls both her commitment to making Narnia always winter and never Christmas, and Dante’s vision of Satan as paralyzed in ice. This time, she is a powerful temptation not to Edmund, but to Peter.

The real problem with the film, I’m saddened to report, has to do with Aslan. This is due in part to the book’s relegation of him to a more marginal role than he had in the first book. On screen, he seems almost like one of the other animals — more powerful, certainly, but not all that mysterious. Except for when he roars, he is more cuddly than fearful. His admonitions to Lucy about the importance of fidelity to him come off as formulaic. A sign of the extent to which Aslan has been diminished in the film is evident in the penultimate scene, in which the children depart Narnia. In the book, they say goodbye to everyone else and then, last, “wonderfully and terribly,” as Lewis puts it, “it was farewell to Aslan himself.”

By contrast, in the film, the parting culminates with Susan’s sorrow over leaving Caspian. The scene is sweet and innocent enough, but it cultivates in the audience the mundane sense of unrealized romantic possibility, rather than the grand appreciation, both terrible and wonderful, of a cosmic romance of redemption.

— Thomas S. Hibbs is distinguished professor of ethics and culture at Baylor University and author of Arts of Darkness.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTk3M2FjYzdlOTU0MDA3MWJhNDM3ZDViMDQxZDgwNjM=

Crowning Prince Caspian

Crowning Prince Caspian
Behind the movie.

By Rebecca Cusey

Douglas Gresham, co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is the stepson of the author of the Narnia series, C. S. Lewis. A child when Lewis married his mother, Joy Davidman, Gresham and his brother grew up in Lewis’s household and inherited Lewis’s estate. Much of Gresham’s life has been spent safeguarding his stepfather’s legacy, and pursuing the dream of properly adapting the series into film. In a phone conversation, I asked him about life on the set and behind the scenes of the movie, which hits theaters this weekend.

What is the essential thing that they absolutely have to get right in this movie?

The underlying messages of the story are so important, and so vital in fact, to the story; [they] are the return to faith, truth, justice, honesty, honor, glory, personal commitment, personal responsibility. All those things come out so strongly in the movie and were very important to me. Also the message is of vital importance, No matter how far away we stray, there’s always just one way back.

Do you think they got Aslan right?

Oh, yes. Far better than last time even. Aslan, in this movie, has all those characteristics which were so difficult to attempt last time. We’ve taken the technology that we’ve pioneered in some respects, but we’ve pushed out again. So, [with] this huge Aslan, you get this great character who is not only a great lion and beautiful to look at, but he’s warm and he’s welcoming, and just a tad bit forbidding, all at the same time. He’s not a tame lion. It’s all there now.

This film, even more than the other, seems to embody the idea of Muscular Christianity — fighting for what is right against desperate odds — that is apparent in C. S. Lewis’s writings. Would you agree that it is there in this film?

I think it is certainly there in this film to a certain degree. What you have to bear in mind is that the Narnian side tried everything they could, even to the extent of single combat with Peter, to avoid a bloodbath; it was the evil side in the end that brought it about. And that is of course, exactly what happens in our world. At the time that they were being written, Chamberlain [made an] effort to make peace with Hitler, right up until Hitler had betrayed everything they had agreed on. And of course we see it in our world today, where we are trying, Western society is trying — desperately almost — to the mistake of rolling over and playing dead, to pander to everyone else who is attacking it, one way or another. Eventually, of course, what will happen is people will dig their heels in, just as in Narnia, and the thing will be forced upon them. I think there are causes which are important to fight for, and I think that comes out in Prince Caspian.

It resonates throughout the whole of our society. We have to become more and more conscious of that fact, by the way. Most of us go about our little lives hoping that these things will go away and just leave us alone. Well, they won’t. The forces of evil are always going to be there. We’re always going to have to fight them. As Tolkien himself said, “All wars are lost. THE war goes on.”

Did you meet Tolkien?

Yes I did. Fine man, I liked him enormously.

Can we talk a little bit about Susan and Lucy’s more active role in the movie? How do you think Lewis would have responded to that?

Well, I’ve been persuaded by Andrew Adamson, that Lewis’s attitude toward women changed to some extent after he married my mother. Now there was a wonderful occasion that epitomized this to some extent. We’d had a problem in the wood with trespassers coming into the wood, local youths breaking down the trees, carving their initials into the trees, throwing rubbish into the lake, including each other and so forth. Mother said, “Jack we’ll just build a barbed wire fence to keep them out.” Jack said, “It’s no good my dear, they’ll just cut the wire and steal it.”

So, my mother, being from the Bronx, said, “If they do that, I’ll buy a shotgun.” They did steal the wire. Well, she bought one. Small gun. Threw a few pellets, never hurt anybody. She used to blast into the leaves of the trees whenever she saw a trespassers and they all chickened out and went somewhere else.

One day, Jack and my mother were walking up the hill ahead of me. Suddenly, out from the shrubbery, leapt a young man with a longbow and a quiver of arrows, casting himself in the part of a latter day Robin Hood, perhaps. Jack said, “Excuse me, but this is private land and you really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind leaving?” The man’s answer was to put an arrow to the string and draw the bow and point it at them. Immediately, Jack stepped in front of my mother to shield her from the arrow. He stood there for a moment, a very chivalrous thing to do, until he heard my mother in tones of chilled steel behind him saying “Goddamn it, Jack, get out of my line of fire.” He stepped sideways very smartly. That whole kind of experience of my mother’s determination and personality, I think changed Jack’s ideas toward women. In the first book he said “battles are ugly when women fight,” and he was right. But in the second, he did from there on, give them an active role for fighting for truth and justice and what was real.

I’m not entirely comfortable with it, because I do believe battles are ugly when women fight. I think they’re pretty ugly to start with, more so when women get involved. I believe what George MacDonald said was very true, which is that it’s every man’s responsibility to protect every woman, first of all from himself.

So what is the role of chivalry in a world where women take part in battles?

That becomes a very difficult thing to define. I don’t really think women should be involved in active combat. I don’t think it’s fair for the men who are fighting beside them, or the men who are fighting against them. And it’s not fair for the women themselves. I think the idea that women have to become men in our current society is a very bad one.

How do you think passionate fans of C. S. Lewis will receive this movie?

I think passionate purist fans of Jack’s works are going to have some interesting surprises when they see this movie. There is no more purist, more passionate fan of Narnia than myself. After all, I grew up there. I think the people who think about changing the book to a movie will see it was absolutely essential to do what we’ve done.

How involved were you?

Well above my neck, you might say. They call me a co-producer, but so much is under my umbrella of responsibility, there isn’t really a credit for what I do. I’m involved in the development of the screenplay, involved in just about every facet of the film and everything related to it. Video games, merchandise. And of course, we’re working on the next one as well.

How often were you on set?

I spent a lot of time on set. We had some interesting experiences. We were in a valley, way in the mountains, deep in the bush of New Zealand. It rained so savagely. There was a ford to get across the little stream to get into the place. Of course the river rose. No body could get in. It was just myself and about four others were the only people left in the whole base camp. For four days nobody could get in or out. I was on set as much as my other responsibilities to the movie would allow.

What do you do when you’re not making movies?

That depends. A lot of my life is spent overseeing everything that is being done in the publishing department of Lewis’s work. My spare time is largely filled, at the moment, with chopping down a forest of prickly pears in a field I’ve just bought. My life is pretty full.

You have children and grandchildren?

We have five children and we have nine, about to be ten, grandchildren. The keenest thing about having kids is grandkids, believe me. It’s wonderful when they hand you grandbabies and you spoil them rotten and when they turn an interesting green color, you hand them back.

— Rebecca Cusey writes from Washington, D.C.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2VjZTY2YzcwZDVjODdiMDBhZjZiYmEzMDA1MTQ1OGY=

Democratic Party of Elites

Democratic Party of Elites

Who gives.

By Michael G. Franc

Pundits have feasted on Barack Obama’s recent musing that Pennsylvania’s rural citizens “cling” to their religion and guns out of embittered economic desperation. Thus far, they have focused on whether Obama is an elitist who views religion as a crutch and whose copy of the Constitution somehow lacks the Second Amendment.

More important, though, is whether Obama’s remarks reflect the emerging demographic transformation of the Democratic party from a bottom-up “party of the people” into a holding pen for all sorts of economic and educational elites. One way to test this is to look at who has been making presidential campaign contributions during the 2008 election cycle. Thanks to the way the Federal Election Commission collects this data, we can sort contributions according to a donor’s occupation or employer.

The Democrats’ penetration of America’s elites is evident when we look at how the two parties fare among those at the very top rungs of corporate America.

Through May 1, the Democratic presidential field has suctioned up a cool $5.7 million from the more than 4,000 donors who list their occupation as “CEO.” The Republicans’ take was only $2.3 million. Chief financial officers, general counsels, directors, and chief information officers also break the Democrats’ way by more than two-to-one margins. The Democrats’ advantage among “presidents” is a less dramatic but still significant $7.2 million to $6.1 million. And this isn’t new: In 2004 all but one of these categories of top corporate officers broke just as dramatically for the Democrats, the “presidents” being the exception.

Republicans do somewhat better further down the corporate food chain, but still lose the competition for contributions from executive vice presidents, vice presidents, and managers.

Wall Street firms, long a symbol of American elite accomplishment, also tilt decisively toward the Democrats. Employees in storied Wall Street institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley have all favored the Democratic field by a large margin. Even both sides of the recent Bear Stearns/JP Morgan Chase deal choose Democratic candidates over Republicans by two-to-one margins.

Democrats also enjoy enormous fundraising advantages among well-educated professionals — lawyers, teachers, accountants, journalists and writers. They carry practitioners of the hard sciences, winning solidly among physicians ($8 million to $4 million), biologists, chemists, physicists, and plain old scientists. Republicans must settle for a slender advantage among rocket scientists.

Not surprisingly, universities offer Democrats a hotbed of support. Professors favor Democrats over Republicans by a nine-to-one margin ($3.7 million to $430,000). Their students, though presumably struggling with sky-high tuition bills, nevertheless sacrificed enough late-night pizza and chips to send $4.1 million to their professors’ favorite candidates and another $1.4 million to the GOP. The “objective” media — reporters, journalists, publishers and editors — also breaks heavily for the Democrats. But no listed occupation gives the Democrats a greater edge than the unemployed. These presumably idle folks have dropped over $14.6 million into the laps of the Democrats. Their idle Republican neighbors, in contrast, have unburdened themselves of a mere $9,775. Go figure.

Who favors the Republicans? The Democratic field, after all, enjoys an overall fundraising edge in excess of $200 million, so any pocket of Republican strength is noteworthy.

In this upside-down campaign season when populist GOP campaigners like John McCain and Mike Huckabee surprised the pundits with their primary victories or, in the case of Ron Paul, their fundraising prowess, it almost makes sense that the party of the country club set has been winning the fundraising race among the common man. That’s right. The white-shirt/red-tie brigade of Republican presidential aspirants holds a nearly three-to-one edge among janitors, custodians, cleaners, sanitation workers, factory workers, truckers, bus drivers, barbers, security guards, and secretaries. While Democrats command the financial loyalty of architects, Republicans successfully woo contributions from the skilled craftsmen who turn their blueprints into reality — specifically, contractors, hardhats, plumbers, stonemasons, electricians, carpenters mechanics, and roofers. This trend extends to the saloons, where the Democrats carry the bartenders and the Republicans the waitresses. The GOP field even secures more financial support from teamsters, steelworkers, bricklayers, and autoworkers.

That’s the good news for the GOP. The bad news is that fewer of these politically active citizens contribute to campaigns and, when they do, they contribute far less than their elite brethren.

What should we make of all this? National political parties, after all, reflect their supporters, and party leaders traditionally feel a responsibility to cater to their supporters’ whims. A party that receives overwhelming support from elite Wall Street investment firms, corporate bigwigs, and highly educated professionals may find it exceedingly difficult to raise their taxes or impose draconian new Big Government regulations on them. Similarly, a party that is losing well-educated suburban professionals and gaining support from blue-collar workers may find it more difficult to support free trade agreements and embrace globalization.

Washington Democrats have already adapted their Big Government instincts to this new reality. They have designed government guarantees, subsidies or handouts to address the insecurities of middle- and upper-income American families. Think of the new subsidies proposed on Capitol Hill for higher education, more generous flood insurance for vacation homes, bailouts for homeowners with mortgages as high as $730,000 and welfare-style health coverage for kids in middle-income families, and you get the idea.

Their Republican counterparts, meanwhile, have struggled over how best to sell the benefits of limited government, lower taxes, and free markets to the elites who used to love them or their new, more populist constituent base. Addressing this new reality may be the most important challenge both major parties face in the months and years ahead.

— Michael G. Franc is vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2I4ODc3MGY4ODY1OGEyYTQ0OTBhYzc1OTQzYTM5ZmY=

Let’s Quit While We’re Behind

Let’s quit while we’re behind

By Christopher Buckley

“The trouble with our times,” Paul Valéry said, “is that the future is not what it used to be.”

This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud—indeed, staunch— Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.

Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted “a higher father.” That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, “Go for it!” There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)

Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?

There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first heard the phrase “compassionate conservative.” It had a cobbled-together, tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let’s give it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore’s “Prosperity for America’s Families.” (Bo-ring.)

Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it does “Mission Accomplished.” Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation….

Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?

A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terri Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?

The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.

Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.

George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”

What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back?
One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.

My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”

(Or was it Federalist 78?)

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.buckley.html

Edmunde Burke and Ireland

Number 12, Arran Quay

Edmund Burke and Ireland

By Joseph Morrison Skelly

“Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a little way East of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to an old doorway … of an eighteenth-century house … Number 12, Arran Quay.”

For advocates of ordered freedom, Number 12, Arran Quay is an important address. Why? This is where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 and lived until he was 20, when, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he moved to London to study law, enter politics, and shape the course of history. Burke’s career as a Whig member of the British parliament, however, has tended to overshadow his birthplace in the popular imagination. It did not go unnoticed by Russell Kirk, who opens his classic study, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, with the literary signpost quoted above.

Kirk understood that Burke’s Irish heritage had an influence on his worldview. So, too, have other scholars, including Sean Patrick Donlan, a lecturer in law at the University of Limerick and the editor of a new, compelling collection of essays entitled Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities. In his introduction, Donlan states that the volume’s purpose is “to invite discussion of Burke’s relationship to Ireland,” which is an appropriate conversation on Saint Patrick’s Day. Exploring Burke’s Irish background, in combination with some of the other more famous episodes in his career, will enhance our understanding of one of the most significant historical figures of the North Atlantic world. We will also see that Burke has much to teach his trans-Atlantic political heirs today, including reform-minded conservatives in the United States, their patriotic counterparts in the United Kingdom, and democratic citizens everywhere dedicated to winning the War on Islamic Terror.

The Great Melody
While Burke is most famous for his sustained opposition to Jacobin tyranny in Paris, which is encapsulated in his landmark treatise of 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France, we can learn much from his preceding years as a Whig reformer, which began in the late 1750s and, for American readers, are best expressed in his famous speech in 1775, “On Conciliation with America.” Both stages of his public life, as we shall see, are more consistent than is commonly understood. At the outset of the first phase, according to Kirk, “Much in the Whig program could attract the imagination of a young man like Burke: freedom under law, the balancing of orders in the commonwealth, a considerable degree of religious toleration, the intellectual legacy of 1688.”

Where did this reformist impulse originate? Some scholars trace it, in part, to Ireland, where Burke witnessed first-hand the tenuous situation of Catholics, whose prospects were circumscribed by the self-aggrandizing habits of Anglo-Irish landlords and the residual effects of the Penal Laws (watered-down since their passage in the late 17th century, they still prevented many Catholics from joining certain professions, acquiring property, voting, or holding elective office). All of this would have cut close to the bone for Burke. He was a Protestant and a member of the Established Church, like his father, Richard (who, incidentally, may have converted in order to become a lawyer), but his mother, Mary Nagle, was a Catholic from the Blackwater Valley in Cork, where he spent time as a youth and would have encountered a Gaelic culture straining to maintain its customs, its religion and its land. In 1761 he observed these conditions again when he returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, a member of Parliament who had been appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the second-ranking official at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British administration in the country. Spending part of each year in his native land, he grew more agitated by the corrupt Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the enduring restrictions on Catholics. During this time, he penned one of his early political pamphlets, entitled Tract Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, which was an attack against the Penal Laws.

Burke’s official stint in Dublin, combined with his family background, may cast light on some of the public campaigns he waged. In his book Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, Russell Kirk writes: “Detesting the arbitrary exercise of political power, Burke was led into the four great struggles of his life — his effort to obtain conciliation with the American colonies, his participation in the Rockingham Whigs’ contest against the domestic power of George III, his prosecution of Warren Hastings [the governor-general of Bengal], and his impassioned resistance against Jacobinism, the ‘armed doctrine.’ In America, in England, in India, and in France, the denial of justice roused Burke to greatness; for his Dublin Castle years had shown him how order and freedom must be kept in a tolerable balance or tension, that all may be safe together. Irish affairs became the microcosm of his politics.”

In his poem “The Seven Sages,” William Butler Yeats lends a musical air to Burke’s opposition to “the arbitrary exercise of political power.” Replacing Kirk’s England with Ireland (which Burke worked tirelessly to improve), he intones:

American Colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it.

The Irish statesman and scholar Conor Cruise O’Brien utilizes this Yeatsian motif for the title and central organizing principle of his magisterial biography of Burke, The Great Melody. In his preface he asks, referring to the last word of Yeats’ couplet, “What was it?” His reply: “the abuse of power.” Furthermore, O’Brien asserts, “Yeats was right about the main point. That is, he correctly identified, and isolated for attention, the main areas on which Burke’s creative energies were concentrated throughout the long and overlapping periods of his career.” There were therefore benefits to Burke’s Irish legacy. It opened a window onto other regions of the British Empire suffering from misrule, like America and India; it hard-wired him with an inner early warning system receptive to rebellious sentiments; it highlighted the need for social, political and religious reforms, both for their own sake and to stave off revolution.

In retrospect, Burke’s resistance to unbridled power and his rejection of political vice are important reminders for contemporary conservatives that reform is wholly compatible with their political philosophy. A Burkean approach expands and improves upon our conception of modern conservatism: it is both a defender and a restorer of liberty. Burke represents a starting point for likeminded American citizens wedded to national renewal in accord with the timeless principles of liberal democracy.

Irish, English, British
The epitome of conservative reform in our own era is Margaret Thatcher. During her pathbreaking tenure as prime minister, she revitalized the sclerotic British economy and reinvigorated personal responsibility at home, while abroad she confronted tyranny and helped Ronald Reagan win the Cold War. Today, the United Kingdom remains a natural wellspring of conservatism, despite the Labor party’s long hold on power; the Tory party, in fact, is gaining traction in opinion polls and may be set for a return to government. Still, if the country is to remain a platform for conservative renewal it must overcome threats to its national integrity from without and within. The European Union, which is the antithesis of the Burkean constitutional model, is centralizing power in a labyrinthine bureaucracy in Brussels. Centrifugal forces in Scotland, the home of Edmund Burke’s friend Adam Smith, and similar, albeit paler, sentiments in Wales, jeopardize the unity of the United Kingdom. Imagine its unraveling. Such an outcome might have long-term consequences for political conservatism, not to mention international security. In Britain it would mark the end of three centuries of stability inaugurated with the Act of Union in 1707, the internal constitutional settlement that accelerated the nation’s rise — a point made often by Andrew Roberts, the author of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. It might also undermine the U.K.’s role in the Anglo-American security alliance, the partnership that underpins NATO and the War on Islamic Terrorism.

Edmund Burke may offer a historical counterweight to the processes underway in Brussels and in Edinburgh if we reconsider his national identity. He was born in Ireland, but did that mean he was Irish? In a review of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody, Paul Johnson calls Burke “the greatest Irishman who ever lived.” This is accurate in terms of his stature, but we are then confronted with another query: what was the nature of his Irishness — was he a Gaelic patriot, a Jacobite enthusiast, a member of the hidden Catholic gentry, or a pillar of the Protestant Ascendancy? There is ample room for discussion. Indeed, the scholars in Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities participate in an engaging, intellectually rigorous debate about this topic.

In one provocative essay, Katherine O’Donnell suggests that Burke may have harbored Jacobite sympathies. Lingering esteem for the legacy of King James II, the Catholic Duke of York who ascended to the English throne after the death of his brother Charles II in 1685 only to be deposed three years later, was still common among Irish Catholics throughout the eighteenth century, decades after he lost to the Protestant King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which sealed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. O’Donnell argues that the “result of reading Burke as a ‘crypto-Catholic’ Irishman and reading his Reflections [on the Revolution in France] within the context of the Irish literary tradition is that he no longer is an ‘ungainly,’ strange, confusing or confused British statesman,” but rather “a brilliant and unique eighteenth-century Irish orator, a product of his Gaelic Jacobite upbringing and his patriotic Irish education at Trinity College Dublin.” To support this interpretation, which is compelling but perhaps overstated, O’Donnell draws on Burke’s “social origins” in Ireland, especially his maternal links to the Nagle family of the Blackwater Valley.

Whatever their exact nature, Burke’s Irish sensibilities did not sidetrack his career in England, for he rose to become a leading member of the Whig Party and a defender of an enlightened British Empire. They may have induced a spell of diplopia, however, which Nathan Wallace diagnoses in his essay, “Edmund Burke’s Anglo-Irish Double Vision in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent.” In an intriguing case of ophthalmological analysis applied to one of Burke’s earliest political tracts, which bemoans King George III’s encroachment on Parliamentary authority by ruling through quasi-ministers and outlines the functions of a responsible political party, Wallace’s core argument is that

the two most famous features of the Thoughts — the Double Cabinet conspiracy narrative and the defense of party politics — operate on public and private levels. On the public level the pamphlet operates as a Rockingham Whig Party manifesto, and on the private level it operates as a justification of, and guide to, what I call Burke’s own assimilation, as a new Irish man, to the English imperial system.

Wallace wisely reminds his readers that “Recovering Burke’s Irishness does not mean denying the Englishness he so frequently claimed for himself. This self-identification is crucial to understanding Burke’s political identity, and it is therefore no less crucial that we understand the dynamics of this gesture. By identifying his Englishness as an adoption, Burke signals the doubleness of his identity.”

A convincing argument is articulated by Michael Brown in his chapter, “The National Identity of Edmund Burke.” He asks the rhetorical question, “Was Burke Irish?” His answer: “Yes, but only in a limited and highly specific sense.” More to the point, and here Brown is on solid ground, “Burke’s national identity was multiple, polyphonic and integrative.” What does this mean? “In Burke’s case there was clearly a layering of identities onto each other. Burke’s Irish birth and education placed him within that nation … However, his career also supplied him with an English political identity and a British political identity, which both complicated and problematized his Irishness. Burke was, after all, an English landlord, an MP in the parliament at Westminster and a proponent of reform of the British Empire. The first two of these elements … supplied him with a set of commitments to the English nation. The third element, Britishness — which spanned not only the British Isles but evolved into a world-wide identity — both comprehended the other two facets of his political identity and articulated the relationship between them.”

Burke himself would probably agree. Without exaggerating the case, we may thus consider him British, or, more accurately, proto-British. He was proud of his Irish background, but knew where his ultimate loyalties resided. He explained as much in a Parliamentary speech refuting spurious allegations concerning his national allegiance (fueled, no doubt, by caricatures depicting him as a Jesuit and a closet Papist). Burke asserted that “he was a native of Ireland, it was true; and he conceived that much was due by every man to the place of his nativity, but this duty ought not to absorb every other; when another country was generous enough to receive a man into her bosom, and raise him from nothing, as this great country had raised him, to stations of the greatest honor and trust, and conferred on him the power of doing good to millions — such a country had claims upon him not inferior to those of that which had given him birth; it was the duty of such a man to reconcile, if possible, the two duties; however, should they unfortunately point in different ways, it was his bounden duty, either to return the trust reposed to him by the adopting country, or else consider its interests as paramount to every other upon Earth.”

Irish, English, British — this formula best describes Edmund Burke. His national identity provides an important example today. When multiplied by the countless other men and women from Ireland, Scotland, Ulster, and Wales who, like Burke, have thrived while living and working in Great Britain, it offers an alternative to those centralizing and separatist tendencies on the continent and in the country that imperil the liberty that a unified United Kingdom preserves.

“Never Succumb to the Enemy”
Burke’s commitment to the interests of his adopted land, his dedication to reform throughout the British Empire, and his defense of sound constitutional principles all set the stage for the pinnacle of his career, his implacable opposition to the French Revolution, a policy articulated in several works published from 1790 to 1797, including Reflections on the Revolution in France, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Letter to a Noble Lord, and Letters on a Regicide Peace. As Kirk observes, he was a “foe of arbitrary power, in Britain, in America, in India. But with consistency, he set his face against the [French] Revolution in particular and against revolution in general.” How is the latter example consonant with the first three? The year 1789 did not mark the outbreak of a limited rebellion as in 1688 or in 1776, but signaled a radical departure from tradition inflamed by the theories of philosophes like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and resulted in the concentration of authority in the hands of sanguinary fanatics like Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just. Burke was right, in his day, “to stand athwart history yelling Stop!” During his entire life, Kirk reminds us,

Burke’s chief concern had been for justice and liberty, which must stand or fall together — liberty under law, a definite liberty, the limits of which were determined by prescription. He had defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king, and the liberties of Americans against king and parliament, and the liberties of Hindus against Europeans. He had defended those liberties not because they were innovations, discovered in the Age of Reason, but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage.

What is more, “Burke was liberal,” in the noble, traditional sense of the word, “because he was conservative.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien continues this line of analysis when he writes that Rousseau’s disciples in Britain and the United States “saw the French Revolution as continuous with the English and American ones. Burke’s far more powerful mind registered both the immensity and the terrible originality of the French Revolution.” O’Brien then connects him to the ideological struggles of the twentieth century. “From today’s perspective, we can best see Burke’s writings against the French Revolution as the first great act of intellectual resistance to the first great experiment in totalitarian innovation.” Others since have sought to imitate the Jacobins.

“The first and most durable emulators have been the Marxists. Marx and Engels, and later Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, had all the qualities that Burke abominated in the French Revolutionaries: radical repudiation of all existing institutions and arrangements; absolute confidence in their own competence to build a new and far better society; willingness to kill their contemporaries in great numbers, for the supposed benefit of posterity; contemptuous hostility to all religion, and a program for its enforced elimination from the world.”

The question arises: how would this defender of ordered freedom respond to one of its greatest enemies today, namely, militant Islam? To be sure, there are fundamental differences, and we must avoid reflexive comparisons. The Jacobins promoted a political religion, while al-Qaeda adheres to a fanatical theocratic politics. The former sought to eradicate religion from society, the latter seeks to impose sharia law. In foreign affairs, Burke often counseled caution. Kirk is clear on this point: “a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.” In this spirit, some of today’s leading conservatives legitimately question the wisdom of foreign entanglements.

Yet when all is said and done, extremist Islam poses the same threat to our established way of life as the French radicals did in Burke’s day. He would espy in al-Qaeda the same evil he discerned in the Committee on Public Safety. In his masterful Letters on a Regicide Peace, he exhorted his countrymen to fight a “long war” against their enemies, and he would most likely advise the same today. In one of his last letters before his death in 1797, he urged his friends in Britain: “Never succumb to the enemy; it is a struggle for your existence as a nation; and if you must die, die with the sword in your hand.” These words could be Edmund Burke’s epitaph. They may also be our motto, on Saint Patrick’s Day, and until the “long war” is won.

— Joseph Morrison Skelly, a college history professor in New York City, is co-editor of Ideas Matter: Essays in Honour of Conor Cruise O’Brien and has served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTNmZDAxMzdhY2MzZDkxMzU0OTlkNzMwNzFmMTNiNWM=

Buckley’s Program

Buckley’s Program

by Donald Devine
Issue 103 – March 12, 2008

William F. Buckley Jr. was the single person most responsible for creating the conservative movement. The modern conservative synthesis was formed under his tutelage during the 1950s and 1960s at the editorial meetings of the magazine he founded, National Review, crafted with a diverse and thoughtful crew that included Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham and many other creative intellectuals. But Buckley was the center.

His book “Up From Liberalism” was one of his earliest and survived to be the most comprehensive and inspiring statement of his program.

I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy and liberals at bay. And the nation free.

Bill Buckley’s dual attachment to freedom and traditional moral values—he said the critical battle between individualism and collectivism was merely a “struggle on a different level” of the more fundamental one between Judeo-Christianity and atheism—this was the formula that won the hearts of the movement that developed around his towering personality. His call for the revival of individualism and moral responsibility in the face of the dominant and repressive welfare state bureaucratic paternalism of the modern age was the spark that ignited all that followed.

The enemy of freedom was state power and its bureaucracy, especially when it was corrupted by real evil such as under communism and Nazism. Even in the more benign form of democratic welfare statism it was morally corrupting and produced dependence. As the great 19th Century observer Alexis de Tocqueville predicted long before, once the populace obtains “free” benefits from government, it becomes dependent on them. As Buckley put it, “There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self reliance.”

So how has the Buckley program to expand liberty and reduce bureaucracy worked? For many years his conservatism grew quietly in the wilderness but it did finally come to power under Ronald Reagan. The program was successful–for a while. By the end of his term, President Reagan had reduced non-defense federal employment by 75,000 full time equivalent positions (about 100,000 employees). The bad news is that the federal bureaucracy has been increasing ever since. The end of the Cold War did allow the reduction of 330,000 defense civilian employees but non-defense bureaucracy—that which fuels welfare state dependence–increased by 13.6 percent or 145,000 from the time the Gipper left until the current estimate for the last of the Bush years.

The program has retrogressed so far that President George W. Bush could famously demand that “when someone hurts, government must act.” Unfortunately, when government acts, it needs bureaucrats and bureaucracy. Consequently, President Bush has increased domestic government employment more than any other post World War II president, although all of the others have tried. His final (and labeled his most frugal) budget for 2009 seeks an increase of 26,000 additional federal employees. It is true that it is predominantly for homeland security but increases have been across the board, over time in every department except Treasury.

So, has the Buckley program failed? That is not so clear. Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefers a smaller government that does fewer things to a larger one that does more. Americans once really believed “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Today, partially under the critique from Buckley’s movement, this is a national joke. Most people just do not think big, national government works. They are correct. Since 9/11, as noted, the Department of Homeland Security has been lavished with the most funds and personnel. But the additional employees just cannot seem to make the new bureaucracy work. The official Government Accountability Office audits find that DHS met only half of the performance objectives set by the president, the Department and Congress, only on 78 of 171 tasks. Even moderate progress was made on only eight of fourteen major benchmarks.

More important, it is now clear that DHS procedures actually exacerbated the number one challenge it met, the Katrina hurricane. Before 9/11, Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief overwhelmingly relied on volunteers and local government for funds, leadership and personnel. But when it was incorporated into DHS, FEMA not unnaturally adopted the security orientation of its parent. When the hurricane hit, the prime directive of security is always to “secure the area.” As a result, the main potential emergency assistance was kept away from the scene. The president’s own brother sent a flotilla of boats with medicine and supplies that were kept out because they did not have the proper security clearance. Another was sent from Shreveport and turned away. The same fate was met by thousands of other potential helpers.

It is going to get worse. DHS is preparing a more secure control system that will not allow rescue workers to “swarm”—as a “professional disaster relief expert” put it to a reporter–into disaster areas without a federally-issued secure identification tag proving their disaster expertise. Government officials admit most assistance is provided by volunteers but they claim they are without the “special skills” that are required and will be recorded on the IDs. Perhaps, but what is certain is that no one without a badge will be admitted to the next disaster to help. It will be Katrina squared. Even more, what happens if the scanners do not arrive or break down? When people hurt, no one will be able to help anyone.

All of the federal programs are breaking down. The three biggest, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are nearing bankruptcy and the new prescription drug benefit just moved up the end. Education spending has increased 99 percent without any discernable improvement. Each year tests of the transportation security system show that it is easily breached at airports and ports. The agriculture support program is mostly spent on mega-farmers who do not need it. Veterans get lost in the gap between military and civilian health and benefits coverage and often receive inferior care. After a great investment in border security, illegal drugs and laborers still slip through with impunity.

So citizens are correct to question whether government officials can really help. But as Buckley recognized, the greater problem is the dependency the programs produce even if they did work. Not only is great wealth squandered on inefficient or even counterproductive programs that could be used effectively elsewhere but people come to believe at the insistence of the politicians and bureaucrats that only more federal “help” will solve the problems that the Feds themselves have often created–so the rot seeps throughout society to the remotest hamlet.

A California school district recently banned tag, cops-and-robbers, touch football and all other “bodily contact” between children to promote “self esteem” and outlaw “violence;” but actually it outlaws independence and creativity. The Cincinnati Little League has banned chatter on the baseball diamond to prevent “frustration” among the players. A Colorado Springs elementary school eliminated tag, although allowed running as long as no one was chased! At Mascoutah middle school in Illinois, a 13 year old was given detention for hugging her friends before the weekend, violating the school policy against “public displays of affection.” The result of this bureaucratic nonsense, of course, is flabby children. But the bureaucracy has an answer. Call it “obesity,” label it as another national crisis and create another government program (with more employees) to combat the “crisis” they themselves created.

The dependence Buckley feared has become so profound there is not enough will even to have children and create the next generation. With its welfare state more developed, Europe is leading the way. While it takes 2.1 children per childbearing aged woman, Europe is down to 1.3 and the birthplace of the West will soon be depopulated (or become Muslim). The U.S. is doing better but European-Americans are below replacement at 1.8 and, according to a new major study, 80 percent of future population growth will come from immigrants or their children, primarily Hispanic.

While Bill Buckley’s program has not succeeded, his analysis remains even more relevant than when he first wrote because people are more dependent. It is too late to turn to Mr. Buckley, however. He is now gone to his God, obedient to the end, still subservient to the wisdom of his ancestors. He was, in fact, the most generous person I have ever known. But he cannot help us any longer.

It is now up to us to continue his struggle up from liberalism. When the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of the welfare state finally cannot be ignored any longer, people will seek another answer and someone must be there to propose the Buckley program. As he reminded us, no matter how fundamental the challenge, “despair is inappropriate for a culture as buoyant as our own.”

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.

http://acuf.org/issues/issue103/080309news.asp

No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’

An election-season essay

By David Mamet

published: March 11, 2008

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.

Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.

Twentieth century’s greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.

When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.

Every playwright’s dream.

I once won one of Mary Ann Madden’s “Competitions” in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a “10″ of anything, and mine was the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: “I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.” That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year’s subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann’s “Competition”) I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.

But I digress.

---

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

---

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

---

Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

---

“Aha,” you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a “brain-dead liberal,” much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.

White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I’ve ever read about the presidency. It’s called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.

White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

September 15, 2007

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

By HARRIET RUBIN

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

One of Rand’s most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

Rand’s free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father’s pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, “King of Kings.”

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of “The Fountainhead” began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr. Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Rand called “Atlas” a mystery, “not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder — and rebirth — of man’s spirit.” It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world without them.”

The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of “greed is good.” Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”

Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore’s honor. “As a woman and a Southerner,” she said, “I thrived on Rand’s message that only quality work counted, not who you are.”

Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas” at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.” He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he said, “that excellence should be your goal.”

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand’s ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.

Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Mr. Stack says, he took action like a hero out of “Atlas.” He created an “open book” company in which employees were transparently working in their own interest.

Mr. Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Mr. Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Mr. Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in “Atlas”: people guided by reason and self-interest.

“There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out,” Mr. Stack said. “You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity.” He said he defied them. “ ‘Atlas’ helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC.”

Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. “It’s the best business book I ever read,” he said. “I didn’t do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that’s an eye opener.”

Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.”

Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.

In Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software for supply chain companies like Tastykake. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

“We were reading the book,” she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. “For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people. John Galt took all the great minds and started a new society.

“Some of our customers don’t know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book,” she went on. “Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ”

Teaching America

Teaching America
Do you know our heroes?

By William J. Bennett

These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation’s young people; too many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know this.

The truth is, we’ve been in far worse shape in terms of what we’ve had to endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of their own country’s history.

This year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (our “Nation’s Report Card”) revealed that over 50-percent of our nation’s high-school students — our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their education careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades with the Nation’s Report Card, you will see students know more in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know about it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest political story ever told so dim?

Too many of our nation’s adults have taken too dark a view of their country and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation. Too many in our culture would rather point out our nation’s failings than its successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views). Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.

Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks like the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs and tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the tragedy of those failures intact — they don’t redact, they don’t gloss over, and they don’t dull down.

But that is not the history we give to our students. One education expert recently wrote, “students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a complete history book.” That’s a history book of any sort: a biography, a 1776, a Bruce Catton Civil War book. And, a recent national survey found that a majority of public high-school students are never assigned as much as 12-page history paper.

This is doubly tragic when we stop to consider we are not talking about just any country’s history here, we are talking about our country’s history — the country Abraham Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.” We are, after all, a country that has prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for those who could not defend themselves, we have liberated the immiserated, and we are a city of refuge for foreigners as well.

With all that has gone wrong in our war and in our economy dare I repeat our merits and take a positive view? Of course I do. In the midst of a previous war’s dark days that had cost many lives and would cost many more — hundreds of thousands more — President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still say “we are a great nation” even as we fought for what he called “total victory” against an enemy that hewed to a “pirate philosophy” of fascism, even as we had just come out of the Great Depression. And, I remind that Lincoln could call us the “last best hope” only three months after Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history.

But, America is not just the story of presidents. It is not just the study of great leaders, but, rather, of the undertaking of a great people — the study of great citizens who wisely choose how to save themselves and others, how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest nation in the history of the world.

While we have our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Roosevelts, our Trumans, our Reagans, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life, in every city in America. If we take on the complete study of our country again — the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly — we will realize that for every anti-hero that we can be criticized for, there are hundreds of heroes; for every dark moment, there are thousands of rays of light to be seen through the passing clouds

Those who watched the recent Medal of Honor service for Lieutenant Michael Murphy were awestruck by the presentation to this young man’s family — by hearing of how Lt. Murphy’s “powerful sense of right and wrong,” guided him his whole life, and how he embraced from an early age the importance of “defend[ing] those who could not defend themselves.” “Murph,” as he was known by his friends, was our nation’s 3,445th Medal of Honor recipient, the highest honor our nation bestows.

Why don’t our schools take next week, as Veteran’s Day is celebrated, to start a program where they learn about “Murph” and the other Medal of Honor winners throughout their elementary- and secondary-school careers? Why not invite a veteran in to school next week? Such study would help teach our children history with real-life heroes and, at the same time, it would help repay the debt to those heroes by transmitting their stories unto the next generations. I cannot think of a greater way for young children and young adults to learn history than through the stories that make our history — and these stories deserve to be told and retold.

A time of war is a terrible thing, but it brings opportunities for teachable moments, and it is about the best time there can be to make our heroes and their cause teachable and estimable again. If we rededicate ourselves to studying our history and our people rightly, if we take the time to look at the entirety of our firmament, we will see what our Founders saw we could be, what foreigners who came here saw all along, and what we ourselves can — even today — see once again: that we have something precious here. That something is called America, where young men and women sign up to protect her each and every day in the uniform of our armed services. And it is worth the time of every young man and every young woman in our nation’s classrooms to study why.

—William J. Bennett is the author of Volumes I & II of America: The Last Best Hope — a new box set of American history (including a special audio tribute to Ronald Reagan). Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute .

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGU0MTA5NDIyZDI0M2ViNDdkYWQ4NDIzYzE5OWQzMzQ=

‘Atlas Shrugged’ – 50 Years Later

‘Atlas Shrugged’ – 50 years later

At a time of rampant collectivism, Ayn Rand renewed the promise of liberty. But her ethics are dangerous.

By Mark Skousen

from the March 6, 2007 edition

NEW YORK – When Ayn Rand finished writing “Atlas Shrugged” 50 years ago this month, she set off an intellectual shock wave that is still felt today. It’s credited for helping to halt the communist tide and ushering in the currents of capitalism. Many readers say it transformed their lives. A 1991 poll rated it the second-most influential book (after the Bible) for Americans.

At one level, “Atlas Shrugged” is a steamy soap opera fused into a page- turning political thriller. At nearly 1,200 pages, it has to be. But the epic account of capitalist heroes versus collectivist villains is merely the vehicle for Ms. Rand’s philosophical ideal: “man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

In addition to founding her own philosophical system, objectivism, Rand is honored as the modern fountainhead of laissez-faire capitalism, and as an impassioned, uncompromising, and unapologetic proponent of reason, liberty, individualism, and rational self-interest.

There is much to commend, and much to condemn, in “Atlas Shrugged.” Its object – to restore man to his rightful place in a free society – is wholesome. But its ethical basis – an inversion of the Christian values that predicate authentic capitalism – poisons its teachings.

Mixed lessons from Rand’s heroes

Rand articulates like no other writer the evils of totalitarianism, interventionism, corporate welfarism, and the socialist mindset. “Atlas Shrugged” describes in wretched detail how collective “we” thinking and middle-of-the-road interventionism leads a nation down a road to serfdom. No one has written more persuasively about property rights, honest money (a gold-backed dollar), and the right of an individual to safeguard his wealth and property from the agents of coercion (“taxation is theft”). And long before Gordon Gekko, icon of the movie “Wall Street,” she made greed seem good.

I applaud her effort to counter the negative image of big business as robber barons. Her entrepreneurs are high-minded, principled achievers who relish the competitive edge and have the creative genius to invent exciting new products, manage businesses efficiently, and produce great symphonies without cutting corners. Such actions are often highly risky and financially dangerous and are often met with derision at first. Rand rightly points out that these enterprising leaders are a major cause of economic progress. History is full of examples of “men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.” In the novel, protagonist Hank Reardon defends his philosophy before a court: “I refuse to apologize for my ability – I refuse to apologize for my success – I refuse to apologize for my money.”

But there’s a dark side to Rand’s teachings. Her defense of greed and selfishness, her diatribes against religion and charitable sacrificing for others who are less fortunate, and her criticism of the Judeo- Christian virtues under the guise of rational Objectivism have tarnished her advocacy of unfettered capitalism. Still, Rand’s extreme canard is a brilliant invention that serves as an essential counterpoint in the battle of ideas.

The Atlas characters are exceptionally memorable. They are the unabashed “immovable movers” of the world who think of nothing but their own business and making money. “… I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of them all – that I was a man who made money,” says copper titan Francisco d’Anconia. But these men are regarded as ruthless, greedy, single-minded individualists. They are men (except for Dagny Taggart, who could be confused for a man) who always talk shop and give scant attention to their family. In fact, no children appear in Rand’s magnum opus.

Her chief protagonist, John Galt, is an uncompromising superman. He is the proverbial Atlas who holds the world on his shoulders. He has invented a fantastic motor, yet is so frustrated with state authority that he withdraws his talents – hence the title, “Atlas Shrugged” – and spends the next dozen years working as a manual laborer for Taggart International.

Mr. Galt somehow succeeds in getting the world’s top capitalists to go on strike and, in many cases, strike back at an increasingly oppressive collectivist government. Rand’s plot violates a key tenet of business existence, which is to constantly work within the system to find ways to make money. Real-world entrepreneurs are compromisers and dealmakers, not true believers. They wouldn’t give a hoot for Galt.

Rand, of course, knows this. And that’s OK, because “Atlas Shrugged” is about philosophy, not business. In her world, there are two kinds of people: those who serve and satisfy themselves only and those who believe that they should strive to serve and satisfy others. She calls the latter “altruists.”

Rand is truly revolutionary because she makes the first serious attempt to protest against altruism. She rejects the heart over the mind and faith beyond reason. Indeed, she denies the existence of any god or higher being, or any other authority over one’s own mind. For her, the highest form of happiness is fulfilling one’s own dreams, not someone else’s – or the public’s.

Galt crystallizes the Randian motto: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine.” No sacrifice, no altruism, no feelings, just pure egotistical selfishness, which Rand declares to be supreme logic and reason.

This philosophy transcends politics and economics into romance. The novel’s sex scenes are narcissistic, mechanical, and violent. Are the lessons of her book any way to run a marriage, a family, a business, a charity, or a community?

To be sure, Rand makes a key point about altruism. A philosophy of sacrificing for others can lead to a political system that mandates sacrificing for others. That, Rand shows with frightening clarity, leads to a dysfunctional society of deadbeats and bleeding-heart do-gooders (Rand calls them “looters”) who are corrupted by benefits and unearned income, and constantly tax the productive citizens to pay for their pet philanthropic missions. According to Rand, they are “anti-life.”

But is the only alternative to embrace the opposite, Rand’s philosophy of extreme self-centeredness? Must we accept her materialist metaphysics in which, as Whittaker Chambers wrote in 1957, “Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world”?

No, there is another choice. If society is to survive and prosper, citizens must find a balance between the two extremes of self-interest and public interest.

Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, may have found that Aristotelian mean in his “system of natural liberty.” Mr. Smith and Rand agree on the universal benefits of a free, capitalistic society. But Smith rejects Rand’s vision of selfish independence. He asserts two driving forces behind man’s actions.

In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he identifies the first as “sympathy” or “benevolence” toward others in society. In his later work, “The Wealth of Nations,” he focuses on the second – self-interest – which he defines as the right to pursue one’s own business. Both, he argues, are essential to achieve “universal opulence.”

Smith’s self-interest never reaches the Randian selfishness that ignores the interest of others. In Smith’s mind, an individual’s goals cannot be fully achieved in business unless he appeals to the needs of others. This insight was beautifully stated two centuries later by free-market champion Ludwig von Mises. In his book, “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality,” he writes: “Wealth can be acquired only by serving the consumers.”

Golden rule anchors true capitalism

Smith’s theme echoes his Christian heritage, particularly the Golden rule, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matt. 7:12). Perhaps a true capitalist spirit can best be summed up in the commandment, “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39). Smith and Mr. von Mises would undoubtedly agree with this creed, but the heroes of “Atlas Shrugged” – and their creator – would agree with only half.

Today’s most successful libertarian CEOs, such as John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, have adopted the authentic spirit of capitalism that is more in keeping with Smith than Rand.

Theirs is a “stakeholder” philosophy that works within the system to fulfill the needs of customers, employees, shareholders, the community, and themselves. Their balanced business model of self- interest and public interest shows how the marketplace can grow globally in harmony with the interests of workers, capitalists, and the community – and can even displace bad government.

The golden rule is the correct solution in business and life. But would we have recognized this Aristotelian mean without sampling Rand’s anthem, or for that matter, the other extreme of Marxism-Leninism? As Benjamin Franklin said, “By the collision of different sentiments, sparks of truth are struck out, and political light is obtained.”

John Galt – it’s time to come home and go to work.

• Mark Skousen has taught economics at Columbia University and is the author of the new book, “The Big Three in Economics.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0306/p09s01-coop.html?page=1

Social Networking for Intelligence Agents

CIA Boosts Information Sharing with ‘A-Space’ (Plus Intellipedia and Blogs)

One of the lessons of 9/11 is the danger of ’stovepiping’ in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It’s not enough for agencies to collect the data they need to piece together and disrupt a plot; the analysts who ‘own’ those critical nuggets must be able to find others with relevant information and piece it together. Recognizing this problem, the 9/11 commission recommended that new networks be created to facilitate the sharing of data across agencies.

The New York Times described the problem last year:

The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink — the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network — the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands — used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog — that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

The intelligence community now seems eager to catch-up to the private sector. It has created Intellipedia, blogs, and now a ‘MySpace’-type system in order to boost the sharing of information:

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of “MySpace for analysts” – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community. He says the technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.

“Burying the same number of analysts in ever higher piles of hay would no more increase the number of needles,” says Mr Fingar…

A-Space will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user just like Amazon suggests books to its customers. The site will also allow users to create and modify documents, and determine user privileges, in a similar fashion to Google Documents.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra, Ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, spoke with me on a break from his annual August bike tour of his Congressional district (pictures from the 2006 tour are on Mr. Hoekstra’s website here).

Hoekstra said that he’s encouraged to see the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly experiment with new models for information sharing after showing little interest at the onset. He credits DCI McConnell for ‘taking the ball and running with it,’ when it comes to improving the ability of his team to share information. Hoekstra says that Admiral McConnell clearly means to do more than just “keep the seat warm” until the end of the Bush administration, but to “build an intelligence community to keep America safe.”

Hoekstra didn’t express an opinion as to whether one or more of these new applications would prove revolutionary, or even beneficial, in improving the security of America and American interests. But he expressed an eagerness to see how they turn out, and, given the community’s past failures, we suspect there’s nowhere to go but up.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/08/cia_boosts_information_sharing_1.asp

Rudy’s the One

Rudy’s the One
The free-market leader of the GOP field.

BY STEVE FORBES
Friday, March 30, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Rudy Giuliani is the real fiscal conservative in the 2008 presidential race. That’s why I’m endorsing him for president.

Most Americans know that Mr. Giuliani turned around America’s largest city. They know he cut crime and welfare in half; they know that he improved the quality of life from Times Square to Coney Island and everywhere in between. And they witnessed his Churchillian leadership following the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

Less well known is the mayor’s fiscal record. Nonetheless, conservatives will find it impressive. He built New York’s resurgence not just on fundamental police work, but also on a foundation of fiscal discipline. He cut taxes and the size of government and turned an inherited deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.

Mr. Giuliani entered office in 1994 with a $2.3 billion budget deficit handed to him by his predecessor, Mayor David Dinkins. Liberal conventional wisdom held that the only way to close the gap was to raise taxes while cutting back on basic city services such as sanitation. The new mayor rejected this advice–in fact, he famously threw the report recommending tax hikes in the trash!

Instead, he set out to restore fiscal discipline to the “ungovernable city”–and achieved results that Reagan Republicans can applaud.

In his first budget address Mr. Giuliani explained that he would “cut taxes to attract jobs so our people can work.” While lots of politicians make promises about cutting taxes Mr. Giuliani delivered, overcoming the initial resistance of the overwhelmingly Democratic City Council. He ultimately prevailed 23 times, including cuts in sales, personal income, commercial rent and hotel occupancy taxes. He understood that these taxes were not revenue producers, but counterproductive job killers.

When he left office after eight years, New Yorkers had saved over $9 billion, while enjoying their lowest tax burden in decades. The private sector, which had been hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years before he took office, produced over 423,000 new jobs. Meanwhile the unemployment rate was cut in half. Businesses responded to Mr. Giuliani’s reforms by returning to the center of city life.

So when he talks about his belief in supply-side economics, its not just theory, it’s a plan he has already succeeded at putting into action. He’s seen the results of supply-side economics first hand–higher revenues from lower taxes.

Controlling government spending is another pledge often made by politicians. Conservative voters now know to be skeptical of such claims. But Mr. Giuliani has a record they can have confidence in. His first budget cut spending for the first time in the city since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s–and over the course of his administration he controlled the city’s spending while federal government spending grew by over 40% and average state spending ballooned by over 60%. Mr. Giuliani always made fiscal discipline a priority: instructing city commissioners to cut agency budgets even when the deficits had turned to surpluses.

Mr. Giuliani set out to cut the size of city government, insisting that New York should live within its means. New Yorkers saw their quality of life improve with more effective delivery of services while the bureaucratic ranks were being thinned by nearly 20,000–a near 20% decrease in city headcount, excluding police officers and teachers. He increased the number of cops and teachers because he understood that public safety and quality education are what we expect in return for our tax dollars, not partisan job protection or union featherbedding. As mayor, he proved that government can be smaller and smarter–more efficient and more effective.

Rudy Giuliani can unite the Republican Party and restore our traditional claim as the party of fiscal conservatism. He has already proven he can stand up to liberal special interest groups and achieve tax cuts, even with a Democrat-controlled City Council. That’s the kind of leadership we need in Washington. That’s the kind of leadership that will inspire the next generation of the Reagan Revolution. And that’s why America’s Mayor should be America’s next president.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009873

Promises They Can’t Keep

Promises They Can’t Keep

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; A15

The big lie of campaign 2008 — so far — is that the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, will take care of our children. Listening to these politicians, you might think they will. Doing well by children has now passed motherhood and apple pie as an idol that all candidates must worship.

“We will do whatever it takes to make America a better country, to give our kids a better future,” says Mike Huckabee, winner of the Republican Iowa caucuses.

“We will deliver for our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren,” claims Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic winner in Iowa.

“We’re going to reclaim the future for our children,” says Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Actually, these are throwaway lines, completely disconnected from reality.

Our children face a future of rising taxes, squeezed — and perhaps falling — public services and aging — perhaps deteriorating — public infrastructure (roads, sewers, transit systems). Today’s young workers and children are about to be engulfed by a massive income transfer from young to old that will perversely make it harder for them to afford their own children.

No major candidate of either party proposes to do much about this, even though the facts are well known.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — three programs that go overwhelmingly to older Americans — already represent more than 40 percent of federal spending. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office projects that these programs could easily grow to about 70 percent of the budget by 2030. Without implausibly large deficits, the only way to preserve most other government programs would be huge tax increases (about 40 percent from today’s levels). Avoiding the tax increases would require draconian cuts in other programs (about 60 percent). Workers and young families, not retirees, would bear the brunt of either higher taxes or degraded public services.

Similar pressures, though less ferocious, exist at the state and local levels. Schools, police, libraries and parks will be squeezed by the need to pay benefits for retired government workers. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that states have promised retired workers $2.7 trillion in pension, health care and other benefits during the next three decades. Only about $2 trillion has been set aside; the rest would come from annual budgets.

Medicaid, a joint federal-state program with states paying about 40 percent of the costs, represents another drain; about two-thirds of its spending stems from the aged and disabled. Roads, water and mass transit may also be shortchanged. States and localities pay about three-quarters of their costs.

But facing these facts would expose candidates to three daunting problems.

First: Lightening the burden on the young requires cutting retirement benefits for the old — raising eligibility ages, being less generous to richer retirees and making beneficiaries pay more for Medicare. Simply increasing taxes or cutting other programs won’t work. The problem is not just closing the budget deficit.

Second: We can’t wait. Ideally, prospective retirees would have received several decades’ warning, but we’ve delayed too long. We need to cut benefits for baby boomers and even some existing retirees. They are the source of mounting costs.

Third: Even if retirement benefits were cut, pressures for higher taxes and lower public services would not disappear. Social Security and Medicare are part of the nation’s social fabric. Although individuals’ benefits can be responsibly trimmed, the growth in the elderly population (a doubling by 2030) and rapidly rising health-care costs would still expand total spending. The increases would simply be smaller.

A moral cloud hangs over our candidates. Just how much today’s federal policies, favoring the old over the young and the past over the future, should be altered ought to be a central issue of the campaign. But knowing the unpopular political implications, our candidates have lapsed into calculated quiet.

They pay lip service to children but ignore the actual programs that will shape their future. The hypocrisy is especially striking in Obama. He courts the young, promises “straight talk” and offers himself as the agent of “change.” But his conspicuous omissions constitute “crooked talk” and silently endorse the status quo.

The insidious nature of this problem is that because the spending increases for the elderly occur gradually, the pressures on taxes and other government programs will also intensify gradually. A crucial moment to clarify the stakes and compel politicians to make choices probably won’t occur until it’s too late.

The longer we delay — and we’ve done so now for several decades, because the strains created by an aging society have been obvious that long — the more likely that eventual “solutions” will be unfair to both young and old. To acknowledge that and to come to grips with it would constitute genuine “change.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/08/AR2008010803488.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Renewing the French-American Alliance

VIDEO of the speech available HERE

Renewing the French-American Alliance

November 07, 2007

By Nicolas Sarkozy

Madam Speaker, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States Congress, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The state of our friendship and our alliance is strong.

Friendship, first and foremost, means being true to one’s friends. Since the United States first appeared on the world scene, the loyalty between the French and American people has never failed. And far from being weakened by the vicissitudes of History, it has never ceased growing stronger.

Friends may have differences; they may have disagreements; they may have disputes.

But in times of difficulty, in times of hardship, friends stand together, side by side; they support each other; and help one another.

In times of difficulty, in times of hardship, America and France have always stood side by side, supported one another, helped one another, fought for each other’s freedom.

The United States and France remain true to the memory of their common history, true to the blood spilled by their children in common battles. But they are not true merely to the memory of what they accomplished together in the past. They remain true, first and foremost, to the same ideal, the same principles, the same values that have always united them.

The deliberations of your Congress are conducted under the double gaze of Washington and Lafayette. Lafayette, whose 250th birthday we are celebrating this year and who was the first foreign dignitary, in 1824, to address a joint session of Congress. What was it that brought these two men–so far apart in age and background–together, if not their faith in common values, the heritage of the Enlightenment, the same love for freedom and justice?

Upon first meeting Washington, Lafayette told him: “I have come here to learn, not to teach.” It was this new spirit and youth of the Old World seeking out the wisdom of the New World that opened a new era for all of humanity.

From the very beginning, the American dream meant putting into practice the dreams of the Old World.

From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person.

America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who–with their hands, their intelligence and their heart–built the greatest nation in the world: “Come, and everything will be given to you.” She said: “Come, and the only limits to what you’ll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent.” America embodies this extraordinary ability to grant each and every person a second chance.

Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That’s what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it. And she fought for this freedom whenever she felt it to be threatened somewhere in the world. It was by watching America grow that men and women understood that freedom was possible.

What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The men and women of my generation heard their grandparents talk about how in 1917, America saved France at a time when it had reached the final limits of its strength, which it had exhausted in the most absurd and bloodiest of wars.

The men and women of my generation heard their parents talk about how in 1944, America returned to free Europe from the horrifying tyranny that threatened to enslave it.

Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole.

Fathers took their sons to the beaches where the young men of America had so heroically landed. They read them the admirable letters of farewell that those 20-year-old soldiers had written to their families before the battle to tell them: “We don’t consider ourselves heroes. We want this war to be over. But however much dread we may feel, you can count on us.” Before they landed, Eisenhower told them: “The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”

And as they listened to their fathers, watched movies, read history books and the letters of soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Provence, as they visited the cemeteries where the star-spangled banner flies, the children of my generation understood that these young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.

To those 20-year-old heroes who gave us everything, to the families of those who never returned, to the children who mourned fathers they barely got a chance to know, I want to express France’s eternal gratitude.

On behalf of my generation, which did not experience war but knows how much it owes to their courage and their sacrifice; on behalf of our children, who must never forget; to all the veterans who are here today and, notably the seven I had the honor to decorate yesterday evening, one of whom, Senator Inouye, belongs to your Congress, I want to express the deep, sincere gratitude of the French people. I want to tell you that whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France. I think of them and I am sad, as one is sad to lose a member of one’s family.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The men and women of my generation remember the Marshall Plan that allowed their fathers to rebuild a devastated Europe. They remember the Cold War, during which America again stood as the bulwark of the Free World against the threat of new tyranny.

I remember the Berlin crisis and Kennedy who unhesitatingly risked engaging the United States in the most destructive of wars so that Europe could preserve the freedom for which the American people had already sacrificed so much. No one has the right to forget. Forgetting, for a person of my generation, would be tantamount to self-denial.

But my generation did not love America only because she had defended freedom. We also loved her because for us, she embodied what was most audacious about the human adventure; for us, she embodied the spirit of conquest. We loved America because for us, America was a new frontier that was continuously pushed back–a constantly renewed challenge to the inventiveness of the human spirit.

My generation shared all the American dreams. Our imaginations were fueled by the winning of the West and Hollywood. By Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington, Hemingway. By John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth. And by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, fulfilling mankind’s oldest dream.

What was so extraordinary for us was that through her literature, her cinema and her music, America always seemed to emerge from adversity even greater and stronger; that instead of causing America to doubt herself, such ordeals only strengthened her belief in her values.

What makes America strong is the strength of this ideal that is shared by all Americans and by all those who love her because they love freedom.

America’s strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and moral strength. No one expressed this better than a black pastor who asked just one thing of America: that she be true to the ideal in whose name he–the grandson of a slave–felt so deeply American. His name was Martin Luther King. He made America a universal role model.

The world still remembers his words–words of love, dignity and justice. America heard those words and America changed. And the men and women who had doubted America because they no longer recognized her began loving her again.

Fundamentally, what are those who love America asking of her, if not to remain forever true to her founding values?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today as in the past, as we stand at the beginning of the 21st century, it is together that we must fight to defend and promote the values and ideals of freedom and democracy that men such as Washington and Lafayette invented together.

Together we must fight against terrorism. On September 11, 2001, all of France–petrified with horror–rallied to the side of the American people. The front-page headline of one of our major dailies read: “We are all American.” And on that day, when you were mourning for so many dead, never had America appeared to us as so great, so dignified, so strong. The terrorists had thought they would weaken you. They made you greater. The entire world felt admiration for the courage of the American people. And from day one, France decided to participate shoulder to shoulder with you in the war in Afghanistan. Let me tell you solemnly today: France will remain engaged in Afghanistan as long as it takes, because what’s at stake in that country is the future of our values and that of the Atlantic Alliance. For me, failure is not an option. Terrorism will not win because democracies are not weak, because we are not afraid of this barbarism. America can count on France.

Together we must fight against proliferation. Success in Libya and progress under way in North Korea shows that nuclear proliferation is not inevitable. Let me say it here before all of you: The prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is unacceptable. The Iranian people is a great people. It deserves better than the increased sanctions and growing isolation to which its leaders condemn it. Iran must be convinced to choose cooperation, dialogue and openness. No one must doubt our determination.

Together we must help the people of the Middle East find the path of peace and security. To the Israeli and Palestinian leaders I say this: Don’t hesitate! Risk peace! And do it now! The status quo hides even greater dangers: that of delivering Palestinian society as a whole to the extremists that contest Israel’s existence; that of playing into the hands of radical regimes that are exploiting the deadlock in the conflict to destabilize the region; that of fueling the propaganda of terrorists who want to set Islam against the West. France wants security for Israel and a State for the Palestinians.

Together we must help the Lebanese people affirm their independence, their sovereignty, their freedom, their democracy. What Lebanon needs today is a broad-based president elected according to the established schedule and in strict respect of the Constitution. France stands engaged alongside all the Lebanese. It will not accept attempts to subjugate the Lebanese people.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

America feels it has the vocation to inspire the world. Because she is the most powerful country in the world. Because, for more than two centuries, she has striven to uphold the ideals of democracy and freedom. But this stated responsibility comes with duties, the first of which is setting an example.

Those who love this nation which, more than any other, has demonstrated the virtues of free enterprise expect America to be the first to denounce the abuses and excesses of a financial capitalism that sets too great a store on speculation. They expect her to commit fully to the establishment of the necessary rules and safeguards. The America I love is the one that encourages entrepreneurs, not speculators.

Those who admire the nation that has built the world’s greatest economy and has never ceased trying to persuade the world of the advantages of free trade expect her to be the first to promote fair exchange rates. The yuan is already everyone’s problem. The dollar cannot remain solely the problem of others. If we’re not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be its victims.

Those who love the country of wide open spaces, national parks and nature reserves expect America to stand alongside Europe in leading the fight against global warming that threatens the destruction of our planet. I know that each day, in their cities and states, the American people are more aware of the stakes and determined to act. This essential fight for the future of humanity must be all of America’s fight.

Those who have not forgotten that it was the United States that, at the end of the Second World War, raised hopes for a new world order are asking America to take the lead in the necessary reforms of the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the G8. Our globalized world must be organized for the 21st century, not for the last century. The emerging countries we need for global equilibrium must be given their rightful place.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me to express one last conviction: Trust Europe.

In this unstable, dangerous world, the United States of America needs a strong, determined Europe. With the simplified treaty I proposed to our partners, the European Union is about to emerge from 10 years of discussions on its institutions and 10 years of paralysis. Soon it will have a stable president and a more powerful High Representative for foreign and security policy, and it must now reactivate the construction of its military capacities.

The ambition I am proposing to our partners is based on a simple observation: There are more crises than there are capacities to face them. NATO cannot be everywhere. The EU must be able to act, as it did in the Balkans and in the Congo, and as it will tomorrow on the border of Sudan and Chad. For that the Europeans must step up their efforts.

My approach is purely pragmatic. Having learned from history, I want the Europeans, in the years to come, to have the means to shoulder a growing share of their defense. Who could blame the United States for ensuring its own security? No one. Who could blame me for wanting Europe to ensure more of its own security? No one. All of our Allies, beginning with the United States, with whom we most often share the same interests and the same adversaries, have a strategic interest in a Europe that can assert itself as a strong, credible security partner.

At the same time, I want to affirm my attachment to NATO. I say it here before this Congress: The more successful we are in the establishment of a European Defense, the more France will be resolved to resume its full role in NATO.

I would like France, a founding member of our Alliance and already one of its largest contributors, to assume its full role in the effort to renew NATO’s instruments and means of action and, in this context, to allow its relations with the Alliance to evolve.

This is no time for theological quarrels but for pragmatic responses to make our security tools more effective and operational in the face of crises. The EU and NATO must march hand in hand.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I want to be your friend, your ally and your partner. But a friend who stands on his own two feet. An independent ally. A free partner.

France must be stronger. I am determined to carry through with the reforms that my country has put off for all too long. I will not turn back, because France has turned back for all too long. My country has enormous assets. While respecting its unique identity, I want to put it into a position to win all the battles of globalization. I passionately love France. I am lucid about the work that remains to be accomplished.

It is this ambitious France that I have come to present to you today. A France that comes out to meet America to renew the pact of friendship and the alliance that Washington and Lafayette sealed in Yorktown.

Together let us be worthy of their example, let us be equal to their ambition, let us be true to their memories!

Long live the United States of America!

Vive la France!

Long live French-American friendship!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/the_frenchamerican_alliance_is.html

Miracle of Plenty

Miracle of Plenty

We have a lot to be thankful for.

By Rich Lowry

To what do we owe our 20-pound Butterball turkeys, our high-definition TVs, our spacious and warm homes this Thanksgiving? Something that won’t be high on anyone’s list of things to be grateful for, but undergirds our way of life — a centuries-old economic revolution that changed the very terms of human existence.

In his eye-opening new book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Gregory Clark produces a chart tracking income per person throughout history. By Clark’s account, it is essentially flat from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1800, reflecting the crushing burden of providing for our material wants in an environment of economic stasis. Then, income per person explodes upward around 1800, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution that first arrived in England. Without it, most of us would still be living poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.

How poor? “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” Clark argues. “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: 30 to 35 years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery.”

Throughout most of history, Clark argues, humankind was caught in a “Malthusian trap”: Small economic advances were outpaced by resulting population growth that made it impossible for living standards to increase. The massive productivity gains of the Industrial Revolution — driven essentially by expanding knowledge — broke the trap and created modern life as we know it.

“The richest modern economies are now 10 to 20 times wealthier than the 1800 average,” Clark writes. In these economies, it is the unskilled who have benefited most. “Unskilled male wages in England have risen more since the Industrial Revolution than skilled wages,” Clark writes, “and this result holds for all advanced economies.” There have always been very rich people. What’s changed in the past 200 years is the growth of wealth and its spread.

It all started in England, and there’s a roiling academic debate about why. Clark attributes it partly to the slow but sure spread of middle-class values in England: Literacy and numeracy increased, hours worked rose, and interpersonal violence declined.

In his new book “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World,” Walter Russell Mead picks up the story from a geopolitical perspective. England embarked on its capitalist revolution at exactly the time when “the country that mastered this new system would gather rewards that far outstripped all the treasures of any empire in the past.” With that came world power. England reaped the benefits first, then its successor as a superpower, the United States.

The formulas for the two countries’ success have been the same: “An open, dynamic and capitalist society generated innovations in finance, technology, marketing and communications. Those innovations offered the open society enormous advantages in world trade. The wealth gained in this way provided the basis for military power that could withstand the largest and mightiest rival empires of the day.” The effect was to empower two liberal societies that had the wherewithal to beat back dictatorial challenges from continental Europe — from Napoleon’s France to Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia.

And so the miracle that started 200 years ago marches on. “Currently, industrial societies appear to be doubling their rate of technological progress every 10 years,” Mead writes. “If this continues, and there is every reason to suppose that it will, the 21st century will experience the equivalent of 20,000 years of ‘normal’ human progress.”

So long as it remains an open and dynamic economy, the United States is positioned to stay at the heart of this progress. Thank goodness for that, and pass the drumstick.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGZmOTg4ODI3MjQ4YWIwMTViZmE5NDdiMTQ1ZDM1MGE=

Free-Market Think Tanks in Europe

Giving Tanks

Across Europe, thinkers are promoting free-market ideals.

by John Fund

Monday, December 10, 2007 12:01 A.M. EST

LONDON–The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and other free-market Washington think tanks are known to many Americans. What isn’t generally understood is that there has been an explosion of free-market think tanks around the world that are increasingly challenging the conventional view that government is the solution to society’s problems.

Last week the Stockholm Network, an umbrella organization for European free-market think tanks, held its first annual award ceremonies to honor the groups that have been most effective in informing policy makers and the general public about policies like school choice, portable pensions and decentralized approaches to delivering health care. The Wall Street Journal was a co-sponsor, in line with its adherence to an editorial philosophy of “free markets and free people.”

In 1997, the Stockholm Network had five members; it now boasts more than 130 affiliated groups, stretching from Iceland to Armenia. In Bulgaria, the Center for Market Economics has played a major role in building support for the country’s adoption of a 10% flat-rate income tax, effective Jan. 1. “Watch Bulgaria,” says Steve Masty, an economic development specialist based in London. “The intellectual light bulbs that have been switched on there are now having real-world results.”

More than one guest at the Stockholm Network dinner commented that several countries in Europe that escaped the Soviet bloc less than two decades ago are now pursuing reforms that would be regarded as too radical for Western European electorates. In Slovakia, the introduction of a profit-based health system has led to the entry of two private health-insurance companies that have helped drop the state share of the health-care market to 65% from 80% in just two years.

Some of the think tank presidents attending the dinner have suffered more than criticism for their work. Prof. Atilla Yayla, the president of the Association for Liberal Thinking in Turkey, gave a speech last year in which he stated that the single-party secular rule imposed by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s “appears backward rather than progressive.” He said he found it difficult to explain to visitors to Turkey why statues and pictures of Ataturk appear in almost every public space.

Mr. Yayla was viciously attacked in the media and subjected to criminal prosecution for his comments. Now teaching on a yearlong sabbatical in England, he plans to return to Turkey to continue his fight for a truly liberal society that represents a third way between Islamism and Ataturk’s state-imposed secularism. He has more than 500 Turkish academics and intellectuals on his mailing list.

While the Stockholm Network focuses on Europe, that doesn’t mean that free-market think tanks in developing countries are being ignored. This week the Cato Institute is launching a series of international Web sites to build support for the ideas of liberty and to promote the work of local think tanks. Web sites in French, Portuguese, Chinese, Kurdish, African languages and Persian will join existing Cato Web sites in Russian, Spanish and Arabic.The project is the work of Tom Palmer, who 20 years ago as a young libertarian scholar smuggled photocopiers into the Soviet Bloc so dissidents could produce their own samizdat publications. “In many countries there is a clear need for private efforts not subject to or tied to any government entity,” he told me. “Clearly, the government-led efforts aren’t doing such a hot job of promoting the ideas of liberty at the moment.”

John Blundell, president of Britain’s Institute for Economic Affairs, says an increasing emphasis on promoting liberty in developing nations and among immigrants from those nations is appropriate. At IEA’s annual conference for up-and-coming free-market scholars in October, white men were a distinct minority of the 100 students attending. The children of Indian and Chinese immigrants won almost half of the prizes and honorable mentions in IEA’s annual student essay contest.

The original inspiration for much of the worldwide growth in free-market ideas was a slender volume written by F.A. Hayek, obscure professor at the London School of Economics, in 1944. As World War II was winding down and postwar planning for growing welfare states was under way, Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” made a powerful case that the collectivist ideas then gaining ground would almost inevitably lead to a loss of liberty in all its forms.

Hayek also made a positive case that the venerable ideas expounded by thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke, who promoted limited government and the rule of law, could prove a powerful antidote to socialism. Hayek urged proponents of liberty to build on the example of socialists, who built a network of theorists and philosophers that later helped them gain political power. He called for a “a truly liberal radicalism (in the European meaning of that term) . . . which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible.”

A few years after publication of “The Road to Serfdom,” a young entrepreneur named Anthony Fisher met with Hayek and started IEA. It spent 20 years building the case for a freer society until its ally, Margaret Thatcher, became prime minister in 1979.

While the Stockholm Network dinner was held in a celebratory mood, several speakers reminded the audience illiberal notions like protectionism are making a comeback in many countries, and that global warming has become a pretext for those advocating draconian limits on economic growth.Such wrongheaded ideas are also on the march in America. Everyone seems focused on which party will control the White House and Congress after next November’s election. But regardless of who wins, real changes in the public-policy landscape are likely to come only if those who hold political power also have won the battle for their ideas. That’s why, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on the 2008 election, advocates on both the left and right are also pouring money into think tanks. They are preparing for the day when those ideas can be taken off the shelf and put to the test.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010969

Thanksgiving: American Treasure

American Treasure

Giving thanks.

By Mark Steyn

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced’n’diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it. I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:

We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!

Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGQwZTI2NDE0OTg4YWQ5NzZjOWRjNjg5NThjOGEyM2Q=